


Of Gods and Scorpion Grass

by elwisty



Series: The Three-Year Campaign [4]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Neverwinter Nights
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, Gen, Love, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:28:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27289408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwisty/pseuds/elwisty
Summary: Casavir never returned from his last battle.  In the present, the service of remembrance and thanksgiving is going about as well as might be expected. And in the past, Elanee is still looking for her dead knight...
Relationships: Elanee/Casavir
Series: The Three-Year Campaign [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2172165
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

1388 – Uktar

“The blonde unmentionable’s late,” said Peedie. She shot a look up at the tall, austere-looking elf next to her. “I’m not surprised. Fellows like him always want to make a grand entrance, however inconvenient it is for the rest of us.”

The senior priestess from the House of the Moon in Waterdeep didn’t reply. Peedie hadn’t really expected her to. She was tempted to say something tremendously rude about the goddess Selûne just to see if that got a reaction. Or she could ask her about the naked moonlit dancing? Yes, that was better, and it would make a nice topic for a special pamphlet from the Deep Press. Readers would be queueing round the block, especially if she hired the right illustrator.

Something blonde moved in the left-most group on the far side of the lake. “Is that…” She narrowed her eyes. The grimness of the surroundings was only added to by the mist that hung determinedly over the water, though it was past noon. “…No, no…it’s not him. It’s a woman with the most incredible fur hat. Is it dyed? It must be dyed. There aren’t any animals on Toril with fur that colour. Unless it’s from one of the jackals of Anauroch…”

The priestess sighed.

Peedie waited for a few seconds, then nudged her leg. She would have been able to reach a little higher, but that was best avoided in polite social situations. Not that the priestess had made any obvious effort to be polite. “Do you think the Lord’s Alliance will pay our expenses if this ends up in a bloodbath, or we get drowned in the Blacklake?”

“That’s not my concern,” said the priestess. No, it wouldn’t be. This kind of cleric liked to pretend they had a servant to take care of the financial details; maybe she did. But the rich velvet cloak and gloves she wore, and which Peedie couldn’t deny she envied, implied that she was capable of taking an interest in worldly matters on occasion.

Peedie didn’t make enough on her assistant editor’s salary to afford velvet clothing. Nor had she packed any of her thicker woollen garments. Naively, she’d thought that a place called Neverwinter would be warm, even at the year’s arse end. In fact, it was just a tiny bit warmer than Baldur’s Gate. That meant it was too tit-freezingly cold to be hanging around in the middle of a ruined city by the shores of a creepy old lake.

“Can I ask…?” began Peedie. A mistake to start that way. She should have known better.

“Will the question involve the words ‘dancing’ and moonlight’?” her colleague snapped.

“…maybe?”

“Then no. Certainly not. You should go and see how Marcus is progressing.”

The pale young man was standing a couple of yards from the lakeside. He looked like an artist, his eyes flicking up to examine the view, and then down to the board that he held in long white fingers. But she knew that the board was there to support a list of names; Marcus was the closest she’d ever come to having a secretary. Well, there was Bern, though he was technically her boss, so didn’t count…

“He’s doing fine. Just look at him working away there, the poor ill-fed mousie.”

In reply, the priestess flung her cloak over her shoulder before stalking away towards Marcus. It was almost as if she was avoiding her. Peedie smiled. After counting to ten, she followed.

“…everyone is accounted for, Serenar.” That was the priestess’s title, not her name, which was very long and very elvish. “Except for Lord Bann, Commander Darmon and Captain Veirs.” He paused. “They will arrive imminently. They are waiting in the ruined Temple of Lathander to ensure that their appearance is marked by the other delegates.”

Neither of the arbiters asked him how he knew. In the short time they’d all been acquainted, it had been very obvious that the young man didn’t experience the world in the same way as other people.

“Where is this…Knight Captain Khelgar?” The priestess looked around as if expecting a six-foot paladin to spring out of the lake.

“Khelgar Ironfist is there. In the blue tabard.” He pointed to the thick-shouldered dwarf standing at the front of the crowd on the right. He had a shaven head, as a well as a look of genial obstreperousness.

“A dwarf!” sniffed the priestess.

“Not many elves called Khelgar,” said Peedie. “Mind you, it could happen. I’ve covered stories about cross-species adoption hundreds of times. I’m still waiting for the big one though. Literally. Somewhere out there is a dragon reared by gnomes. There’s got to be.”

The elf ignored her. Marcus smiled, or seemed to. Peedie was small for a gnome, and trying to gauge the expression on his face was not unlike guessing the weather on the Cloudpeaks from her desk in the Gate. “If I see such a thing, Peedie the Pen, I will be sure to tell you.”

“Aw. I’ll give you a finder’s fee if you do. Our readers lap up stories like that. Especially if the dragon wants to talk about its love life and childhood trauma.” An athletic-looking black man caught her eye; he was standing with folded arms a little apart from the three principal congregations. “He’s not on the list, is he? What’s his name?”

Marcus glanced at the solitary figure. “Aarin Gend. He worked for Neverwinter and Lord Nasher for many years.”

Ah yes. She’d heard of him. Nasher’s erstwhile spymaster who’d left city and liege lord after the Luskan war. So he was back in his old haunts.

“Aarin…he used to visit our temple when he was on business in Waterdeep…” For the first time, the priestess unbent enough to allow wistfulness to creep into her tone.

A gust of wind blew over them, smelling of rot and river estuary. This had been a beauty spot, once. Peedie tried not to let the oppressive sense of decay get to her. So what, a lot of people had died here? People died all the time. She’d reported on mine collapses and epidemics of marsh fever. For a while, it was very sad, but life went on – diverse, absurd, chaotic, and wholly delightful. And most of it would agree to be interviewed if she nagged it long enough.

A movement beside a tumble-down wall drew her attention. An old woman was leaning against it, out of habit rather than out of need, it seemed to her. A very striking old woman with long white hair and an aristocratic bearing. At any evening soiree, she’d be the most important person in the room, and know it.

Peedie was about to nudge Marcus and ask him about the stranger, but before she could move, the woman had vanished. Well, that was odd, and not at all alarming in any way. Detachments of the Flaming Fist and the City Guard of Waterdeep lined the bridge, while mages from Silverymoon had stationed themselves on the old viewing platform beside the palace. Everything was perfectly safe, she told herself. And if it wasn’t, she had some tricks up her sleeve. No honest pamphleteer ever travelled far without an invisibility ring or two, mainly in case they ran into the people they’d been honest about.

“Who is the old man in the litter?” the priestess said, clearly directing her question to Marcus.

“Lord Tavorick,” Peedie replied quickly. “He’s the last surviving councillor from Old Neverwinter. Neverwinter before Nasher, I mean. The old heap of bones might look as if he’s already been embalmed, but from everything I’ve heard, he’s still as sharp as a pin. They say he killed a demon with a fishing rod when he was in his eighties.”

The priestess huffed in disbelief. “Servants’ gossip, I’m sure.”

“Oh no. It’s true: I was there,” said a high-pitched female voice. Apparently the fashion today was for attendees to appear and disappear at random. A tiefling with a flame of red hair had become manifest at Marcus’s elbow. It had to be Neeshka. Her name was on the list of delegates. “I mean, it helped that the demon was trying to eat Casavir’s arm at the time. Dumb thing to do, right? Way too much plate mail to be an easy snack. Plus, it didn’t notice this old man aiming the point of a fishing rod at its eye, and so poof! Bye bye, demon.”

Peedie just managed to stop herself from reaching for her notebook and pencil. Adventurers’ yarns could be got for a hundred an ounce at home, but to be on the list, one had to be a person of some significance. Later, she’d make sure to sit down with this woman over a bottle of something strong.

“How’s the arbiting going?” Neeshka didn’t stop for an answer to the pleasantry. She reminded Peedie of Peedie. “I did some of that for the miners in Mirabar once. Didn’t think I’d ever be sick of the sight of gold bars. Three days into the guided tour and I was ready to throw up over them. Bleurgh.

“Anyway,” she said, refocusing on Marcus, “Himself wants to know the mood. Is everything okay, or is it time to skedaddle before the killing starts?”

The tiefling looked tremendously relaxed at the idea of a massacre. She was wearing a long jerkin of maple-coloured leather that had been neatly adapted to leave space for her tail. No weaponry was visible – none was allowed, except for the guardsmen – but Peedie would have been shocked if Neeshka didn’t have at least one knife concealed about her person. The bracelet she wore on her left wrist looked designed to be turned into a garrotte at short notice.

“All is…unsettled.” A muscle twitched in Marcus’s cheek. “There’s no feeling of – treachery or double-dealing as yet. Except there -” Peedie followed the indication of one discretely flicked finger to where an expensively-coiffured human loitered near Bann’s followers.

“Oh, that’s alright,” said Neeshka, grinning. “You know Torio. She’s Luskan. She can’t help herself.”

“ _I’m_ Luskan.” Marcus’s brow furrowed in mock outrage.

“Only by about three miles.” Neeshka clapped him on the shoulder. “And I like you anyway. What about Johcris? He’s the one we’re most worried about.”

Johcris was a stone-faced mage, standing amongst Bann’s supporters on the western shore. Another one from the list.

“He’s…irritated at the delay. His daughter’s unwell again, and he’s worried about her. Nothing worse than that.” Marcus rested his pen on the board so that he could rub a hand over his forehead. “But the mood in general is…fragile. No one intends treachery, but they expect it. They’re scared. Some of them are very scared. That makes them dangerous.”

“So we might all kill each other by mistake? Like that’s never happened before.” Neeshka shook her head, as if thinking fondly of happier days. “Time to report back. I bet they’ll be thrilled.” She paused, and added as a careless aside: “I once broke into that house and emptied its strongroom. Good thing I did, right? Imagine the kind of low-life amateur that would have walked off with everything after the Spellplague if I hadn’t.”

The mansion squatted in glum disrepair at the far end of the district. A crow perched on one of its crumbling chimney stacks. The comfortless vision made Peedie glad to revert her attention to the crowd gathered around the mist-covered lake. When she did so, she found that Neeshka had gone.

“You seemed very – accommodating – in your treatment of that tiefling, Marcus,” said the priestess. This was not a good thing, was the implication. “When Lady Imoen recommended your services, she said that you were a neutral party.”

The man’s black eyes slid over them both. He seemed completely unmoved by the remark.

“I am a neutral party,” he said, answering the challenge without heat, “because I have good friends in all three camps. Haeromos paid for my education, and arranged for me to go to Candlekeep.” He singled out a white-haired old warrior from amongst the Uthgardt chieftains and Greycloak officers that composed the majority of Bann’s people. “Brelaina is my wife’s aunt, and her foster mother.” This time he pointed to a dark-haired woman whose hand rested near her belt, where a sword might have hung in other circumstances. She was standing with the largest group, the new Council’s party that included Tavorick and Sir Cormick, the Speaker of Helm’s Hold.

“What about that gang there?” Peedie nodded to towards the southerners. They had to be one of the oddest collections of people she’d seen, including the irregulars of the Elfsong’s taproom. There were lizardmen, dwarves, a couple of orcs, three – was it githyanki or githzerai? – looking as if they’d left their copies of Volo behind at their inn, auburn-haired humans built like oxen, an old elven druid, and a kobold. And now a tiefling. Neeshka had taken up position behind Khelgar Ironfist.

“A few of them saved my life when I was a boy,” said Marcus. The tensing of his shoulders suggested that he wasn’t going to be sharing any more of the circumstances with them. Happily, Peedie had already pumped a contact from Candlekeep for information about the seer.

The priestess was frowning at the list. “You’ve marked the southerners all as present, but I can’t see Farlong or the warlock. I hope you haven’t been cutting corners, Marcus.” Peedie wondered if the elf provided religious instruction to small children very often. She had the voice for it. “We have a very important task today. The peace of Neverwinter could stand or fall according to our efforts.”

It was a source of amusement and no longer one of astonishment to Peedie that the free-spirted Selûne had attracted someone like the priestess to her church. That was so often how life worked. For every inspired vagrant divine, there were fifty temple-bound clerics arranging to keep the wanderer supplied with food, drink, warm clothes and compensation payments for any holy misadventures. Or delivering special services for nobles and merchants with money to spare.

“Farlong’s there,” Peedie volunteered, enjoying the glare she received in return. “She’s chatting to the head of the Elk Tribe in Bann’s group. And if the warlock you mean looks mostly human and has these glowing tattoos, then he’s lurking at the back. You’ll need to use your powers to spot him. He’s cast some kind of invisibility spell on himself.”

Peedie touched her amulet of true seeing, and felt a little smug. Even without its help though, it was clear that the crowd on the lakeshore were growing restive, tense. Farlong was one of only two people to have crossed the group boundaries. The other was the kobold, and that was because he was trying to sell kebabs and ballad papers from a double-sided tray that hung from his scrawny neck. The lines of guardsmen from the Lord’s Alliance were starting to shift uneasily and look around, pikes clasped in leather gauntlets.

“Anyone feel that we’re getting to that point where someone fires their crossbow by accident, and all hell breaks loose? Reckon it might, too, with a warlock and a tiefling on the scene.”

The Serenar pulled her cloak more tightly around her. “I trust in Selûne.”

“Yeah,” said Peedie. “Not her time of day though, is it? This had better not go paws-up and nose to the sky. Zombies make for rubbish copy. I tried doing a feature with some once, and all they wanted to talk about was _uuuuuuurgh_ and _yeeeuuuuuuuurgh_. It’s hard to stretch that sort of material over a column, let alone a full side.

Anyway, that kobold -”

“-Deekin -” Marcus supplied.

“ – Deekin. He has the right idea. Kebab while you can, I say.”

“No one’s buying his kebabs,” Marcus observed.

“How could they?” said the Serenar. “If this were the ruins of Waterdeep, any nourishment would choke me…the horror of this place…”

“It’s just some ruins,” said Peedie. “Believe me, I’ve seen worse round the old school at Ulcaster.” On one level, that was true. On another…she wasn’t going to admit it, but there was something distinctly, specially awful about the remains of Neverwinter. They were recent, for one thing; until a few years ago, this had been the heart of a bustling, wealthy district. A hundred or so mages had swept that all away in a few hours of madness.

“They’re coming,” said Marcus. “Listen.”

“What for?” asked Peedie. “I can’t hear -”

Then she did hear. It was the clip-clop of hooves.

Way above her, Marcus laughed softly. “It’s like a wave,” he explained to them. “The indignation coming off Cormick and a few of the other hold Watch hands. They want to shout that horses and horse-drawn vehicles aren’t permitted in the Blacklake District between sunrise and sunset.”

Bann was unmistakeable. She wasn’t good at estimating human ages, but put him in his twenties or thirties. His blonde hair suggested youth; the lines on his forehead spoke of experience. He was riding a snow-coloured horse. The long moustache, and the circlet round his brow, as well as the Eye of Tyr sewn onto his breast, all seemed perfectly calculated to revive memories of a young Lord Nasher Alagondar.

His mounted escort consisted of two more human males, one dark-haired and handsome in the boyish way of his kind, and the other older. A grey patch covered his right eye. His silver hair was combed neatly to the side, and he wore a long cream overcoat in a style that had been old-fashioned when she’d still been learning her letters.

Numerous helpful hands reached out to hold their horses, and help the riders to the ground. The older man walked with the aid of a cane.

“Lord Bann, called Alagondar. Darmon, once of the Nine. And Captain Rees Veirs. That’s everyone,” said Marcus.

Peedie didn’t wait to confer with the Serenar. She walked up to the shoreline, where the water lapped against a narrow beach of black sand, and held up her right hand, the thumb and little finger folded down, and the three larger ones upright, in the agreed gesture. A moment later, and the priestess joined her.

The delegates were present. The ceremony could begin.


	2. Chapter 2

1376 – Eleint

The second night at the Flagon, the orphan of West Harbour had flung open the door to Elanee’s room, swaying more than a little, and had waved a round-bottomed bottle at her.

“Hey, look what I’ve found! Tethyrian wine. Good vintage too. Well, old. Want some?”

Elanee shook her head. After Lila had gone back to what sounded like a small but enthusiastic party further down the corridor, she stood up and quietly closed the door. Then she returned to her bed, and knelt on it, meditating as she’d been taught to do by the Elders.

The third ten-day at the Flagon, and she was lying on her bed reading a book that had been left behind by a guest. It was a story about the adventures of dragon and a human sorceress in a land that existed on the far side of the rising sun. She thought the book might be called a _novel_.

Knocking on the door made her look up, irritated. She’d just ended the chapter with the sorceress overhearing a plot against the dragon, and the need to know what would happen next was all-consuming.

“Hey, look what I found.” With her grey cloak already blackened and torn in several places, the newest recruit to the Watch held up a string of amber beads. “No magic, but they’re pretty. Duncan said they’d suit you.”

“No thanks, Lila. I would be too likely to lose them in a forest. The string would catch in brambles and branches.” The Circle of the Mere hasn’t approved of jewellery unless it had a practical application. After Daeghun’s foundling left, looking rather crestfallen, Elanee wondered if she’d have enjoyed owning such a necklace after all.

The fourth month after arriving in Neverwinter, and she was back in the wild. Back in nature where she belonged. In this particular early spring, nature was freezing cold, all the more so since they were camping in the depths of the Sword Mountains. She was tending the fire, keeping half an eye on Neeshka who lay convalescing on the opposite side of the recess, when Lila appeared round the corner of the cliff.

“Hey there – look what I’ve found. A real live Paladin called – what did you say your name was again?”

“Casavir,” replied a deep, soft voice.

Elanee dropped the log she’d been holding into the fire at the wrong angle, so that it rolled away from the hottest part. She stared at the space to Lila’s right as it was filled by a human. A very tall, almost hulking human, dressed in a dented suit of plate mail. His black hair had been combed back from a face of intense seriousness. She felt something – was it disappointment? He looked so cold and intimidating. The voice had made her expect someone quite different.

“This is Elanee. She’s a druid. And the body in the corner is Neeshka: the best thief in the world!”

Very close to her right ear, a willow warbler started a whistling song to announce that it had found a good tree, and was prepared to defend it to the death. It broke her trance.

All that – all that had happened over two years ago. She remembered where she was, what had happened, what she’d done. Agonized, her grief infected every heartbeat. Her fingers twisted in her hair; the nails dug into her scalp. She wanted to cry, but only managed a few dry sobs that ended in a choking fit that shook the bough underneath her, making the warbler flutter up to a higher branch and resume its song with the added gusto of indignation.

Once she could breath again, she forced herself to take her hands from her head and grip the bough instead. She straightened her back against the trunk of the alder, tried to reach out to feel its spirit.

But she only found her own memories, the recent ones that she wanted to escape. How the spell had smashed her against a wall. She’d pushed herself up, seen the others still penned in by shadows and golems on the far side of the chamber, saw Qara walking towards her, the girl’s figure haloed by flames, her face – not angry or happy. And not merciful either. Not really there. And then –

Another series of choking sobs wracked her. She stuck her fist in her mouth, and bit down on it in an effort to regain some control. She couldn’t spend all night crying halfway up a tree; she wasn’t a child anymore. Hadn’t been for…decades.

Her pulse had almost returned to normal when she saw Casavir again in her mind’s eye. Her last sight of him, his armour shining, his jaw set as he brought his warhammer down on the shoulder of a sword golem.

She scrunched herself up again. This time she managed to cry properly, though now she hated her tears as they fell. What good were they doing? Weren’t they an indulgence? Her self-pity was disgusting. She’d lost any right to it.

Dawn was breaking when she finally let herself drop from the alder onto the spongy turf. She had no energy left to shapeshift; no energy for anything at all.

At first she simply lay on the ground where she’d landed. A spell to restore herself was possible; she certainly hadn’t exhausted her powers yesterday. But it was fitting for her to be like this. She deserved it. Nor could she think of nature at present with any sense of connection, of love. It was too tied up with who she was, and her past, and she hated both.

After some time, the first sunlight of the day began to warm her body. Through bleary eyes, she looked up, and saw a brilliant blue sky stretching from horizon to horizon. Immediately, she rested her head back on the moss, and folded her arms over her head to keep out the morning. But the blue had stirred something awake within her. She was in the heart of Merdelain, where fogs could last for days soak up sound like peat absorbing water.

And now the sky was clear, and birds were singing in the trees. And she was alive, despite spending the night alone in the Claimed Lands.

So they’d won then. The others. They’d destroyed the King of Shadows. That must have been what triggered the collapse. If she’d stayed, Casavir could have been watching the sun bloom over the country of brackish fens and bogs. Or she could have been lying beside him, crushed under a thousand tonnes of rock. Either option would have been preferable.

She pushed herself onto her knees, and crawled uphill towards the edge of the landslip. Movement released a reserve of strength that she hadn’t known was there. She stood. Her head swam, and she staggered, but caught herself before she could tumble down to the morass of earth and stone some twenty feet below.

The top of the hill looked like a broken egg. Here and there spars of rotted wood jutted from the top of the chamber walls. All around the hill, she knew, there’d be similar new hollows; cave-ins that would be filled with water seeping out of the beds of loam and peat. Yesternight she’d sat numbly on the hillside, listening to the sound masonry crashing onto ancient mosaic floors for hour after hour.

“Casavir!” she called. The loudness of her own voice shocked her. She caught her breath, and watched the rubble. Nothing moved. She could sense no life within the debris.

There had to be something she could do. No help could be got for miles around; the villages of the merelands would be the habitation of ghosts, Leilon was evacuated, Crossroad Keep was a day away at best, and she didn’t know what kind of welcome she would receive there. Would Lord Nasher and Nevalle harken to her, a little druid whose existence they’d barely registered? Would they even send out a search party?

“Casavir!” she called once more, miserably, not expecting an answer, and not receiving any.

Rubbing the tears away from her eyes, she tried to focus on a spell of restoration. After several failed attempts, she completed it. Silvanus answered her call, even though she’d have traded the god for Casavir without a second thought. Would have traded Him for Zhjaeve, who’d always seemed to like her. She felt a stab of guilt for not remembering the dark-eyed githzerai earlier. Was she down there with the others, or had she been able to teleport away in time?

She felt the smallest flicker of hope. Zhjaeve, at least, might have escaped.

Exhaling, she raised her arms to shoulder height, and held them straight. She let the sun dry the latest fall of tears on her cheek. Then she made her first shift. The world became grey, and sharp, and wide. All of a sudden, the violet shell of a beetle in the grass became powerfully interesting.

A slight thermal rising from the pit caught her wings, and blew her back. She rose higher, fought against the current, and won. Catching the right air stream, she glided down to the rubble.

As soon as her claws touched the earth, she shifted again, not bothering to return to her form as was advised. Her vision assumed a warmer ochre-shaded palette. Despite weighing as much as an ox, the new ground held under her. That would make it easier for her to dig, but reduced the likelihood of the being concealed air-pockets, or gaps in the fallen masonry that a human might be sheltered in.

She set to work. As an earth elemental, she could dig and lift stones with the minimum of effort. Still, there was too much soil and too few boulders for her liking. With every handful of soil and gravel she moved, more trickled down to fill the space she’d made.

By noon, she knew it was futile. She could dig for days, and never reach the bottom of the chamber. Her earth elemental form faded, and she was left kneeling in the dirt, a small elf woman with alder leaves in her hair.

She carried on digging. She didn’t know what else to do.

A heavy shower of rain drummed onto the rubble, raising clouds of dust, and leaving ribbons of water flowed round the stones and away into the earth near the chamber walls. She held her head back with her mouth open, and caught a few drops on her tongue. After the rain stopped, the soil stayed where she piled it, yet became damp and heavier to lift.

Dusk was falling when she heard voices. She froze. They were still a fair distance away. She shapeshifted into a thrush on instinct, and flew away from the pit to land in a stubby blackthorn. The leaves were plentiful enough to lend her camouflage.

Kana and Bevil emerged from the edge of a belt of willow. With her bird vision, their faces seemed hard-edged and strange. A few Greycloaks walked behind them, carrying spades and long, thin poles.

“Oh Gods. Chauntea!” she heard Bevil mutter as he looked up at the ruin of the hillside.

Similar reactions came from the Greycloaks. One simply stood stock still, and blinked. “Nine hells!” she said.

Kana continued towards the remains of the chamber at the same speed, making no comment on the destruction. She stopped at the edge, exactly where Elanee had stood that morning. The thrush’s eyes prevented her from deriving any emotion from the look of Kana’s face. It was as if she’d been covered in spider-silk, on which an artist had drawn lines in black ink to represent the cheekbones, mouth, and brows. The same went for Bevil and the soldiers.

“There is nothing we can do here,” said the seneschal once Bevil had caught up with her. “Neeshka said the chamber was at least sixty feet high. The earth from the hill has smothered everything.”

Bevil nodded, shoulders slumped. “At least most of them got away.”

Elanee spread her wings, ready to take to the skies with the burst of hope that so suddenly had made the world shine like silver. Whether elf or mistle thrush, hope felt the same.

“Agreed,” said Kana. “If Neeshka is still running her sweepstake, I would wager a month’s pay that Captain Farlong and Jerro are alive.”

“You know about that sweepstake?” Bevil sounded alarmed. Elanee hopped impatiently on her branch. Casavir. They needed to talk about Casavir. That Lila Farlong had apparently survived the fight and collapse was hardly a surprise.

“Indeed I do, sergeant. I even know who placed bets, and on what.”

The big Harbourman moved from foot to foot. He folded his hands behind his back. “So…who’s left down there? Qara, for sure.”

“Yes,” Kana paused. “Sir Casavir is there too…”

She said something else, something about Grobnar, but Elanee wasn’t listening. Her hope imploded in on itself. Casavir was dead. His body was already buried on the tiled floor of the old palace. The earth was in his mouth. If the falling slabs had even left him with a mouth.

The pain of it made even vague proximity to the uncaring, unfeeling humans intolerable. She flew, heading northwards. The Keep still had the power to draw her to it, though the reason for its once-homeliness was gone.

As she spied moonlight reflecting off the River With, she realised she couldn’t go any further. She skimmed the surface of the water, imagining what would happen if she stopped moving her wings. Did she have the courage to do that?

Of course she hadn’t. Coward. Coward. Coward.

And still a coward, she rolled herself against the sandy riverbank, giving herself up to the blackness of sleep before the pinions had even withdrawn from her arms.

As the second day after the collapse shone down in full force, her sleep disintegrated, and she lay staring at the water flowing past her den, letting the flow carry her mind somewhere quite different.

Even in early summer, the first weeks in the Keep had been draughty and lacking in comfort. The evening after they returned from Neverwinter with Kana and a tiny garrison in tow, most of them had spread their bedrolls in a large room on the main floor. It had the advantage of being defensible, in case anything nasty emerged from the lower levels, and had a working fireplace once she’d chased the pigeons out of the chimney.

Shandra had put Qara in charge of the fire-minding, and gone with Neeshka, Lila and Khelgar to explore the abandoned chambers in the towers and upper floors. Elanee had stayed behind, spreading her bedroll in the corner of the room furthest from the hearth, and arranging the few possessions she’d brought with her around it.

Her latest book from Blacklake, a piece of bark from the Forest of Tethir that Elder Naevan had brought her on one of his intermittent visits to the Circle, her case of potions. That was all. And Naloch too, of course. Her badger lost no time in curling up and falling asleep.

She lay back on her bedroll, nudging Naloch to the side. The plasterwork on the ceiling was a damp mess. When it had first been laid, someone had gone to the trouble of moulding traceries of wild roses along the edges. Now pieces were missing, or blackened and hanging loose ready to fall. Grobnar’s voice kept up an insistent, high-pitched drone. It seemed that in the strange priestess from another plane, he’d at last found an audience who was too polite to invent an excuse to be elsewhere.

“May I sit with you?” Casavir’s deep voice.

She sat up, confused. He rarely spoke, except when he had some advice or insight to give on serious matters – and then, it was Lila or Shandra that he spoke to, and not her.

“Of course. Are you feeling unwell?” She’d used up most of her stronger spells earlier that day, and so reached for her potions case.

“I do not need healing…I am sorry for disturbing you.” His huge frame folded itself down with remarkable speed and grace. He sat a few feet away from her, legs crossed, hands on his knees. “I merely wished -” he paused, and seemed to be gathering his thoughts. She waited for him to continue.

At some point in their travels, the paladin’s face had changed to match his voice. She didn’t know exactly when in the last few months she’d stopped seeing his as cold and brittle. But she had.

“We have achieved much since I joined you in the mountains. The orcs have been driven back. We saved a young woman from the clutches of the githyanki. Retook the finest castle in the land.” His eyes flickered around the crumbling room, and he smiled slightly.

She wasn’t sure what to say; although she’d been present at each event, had fought and healed the wounds of her associates after their battles, the victories had felt impersonal. They were just things that had happened. It was a relief when he carried on speaking without looking to her for a response.

“It seems – presumptuous – even to think it, and to risk drawing the spite of the dark gods down on us, but increasingly I feel as if we have passed a turning point. For years – through the plague and the war with Luskan, and then around Old Owl Well – I believed that we were subordinated to a poisonous tide. And the tide was Luskan, and the orcs, but it was in our souls too. Diminishing them.

“The justice and mercy of Tyr seem closer, almost tangible, after my experiences in the last months. For years they were distant stars in a sky that was otherwise…empty. Now…the ideals I had almost despaired of, are becoming real. Or so it seems to me.”

She wondered briefly if he was trying to proselytise, but dismissed the notion. Casavir wasn’t that sort of man. He flicked a lock of hair away from his forehead. It fell back at once. Elanee smiled, and Casavir met her eyes, and smiled too.

“More than our other companions,” he continued, “you are concerned with the divine. With the part of us that strives to be more than it is. If you would be willing to share your thoughts with me, your views as a follower of Silvanus, you would help me to...give some order to my own ideas.”

Elanee was lost for words. In Neverwinter, the people mostly talked about the weather or trade, and exchanged sinister rumours about Luskan and the activities of bandits on the roads. When she lived in the Circle, there had certainly been much talk of a theological bent, but the ones doing it had been the elders. No one there had ever asked for her opinion. Kaleil did, but he was a pupil of the Circle like her, and not an initiate.

“Forgive me. I do not wish to beset you with questions -”

“You’re not,” she replied. She folded her hands together in her lap as she strove to put her thoughts into words: the right words. They were there, she knew, the ones that would express both her ideas and feelings precisely, but lifting them out of the swirl of sounds and images was a struggle. “”Silvanus expects his servants to uphold the Balance: by this He means the balance between death and renewal, between predator and prey, between one species and another, between the fruitful ground and the barren. But He also loves life above all.”

“That could appear contradictory,” said Casavir softly, “in certain circumstances.”

She nodded. “Elder Naevan told me that each person has to form their own understanding of the god’s will anew every day of their life. He said he thought the contradiction was deliberate: faith was like walking through a great uncharted forest, not like following a path over a meadow. With every step, you have to make a decision about your route.”

“Your teacher sounds like a wise man.”

“He is. Or was, I fear. He said he would go to look for the Circle of the Mere – the druids who raised me in the Merdelain – and since then I’ve heard nothing.” She clasped her hands together more tightly. Concerning the Circle she had…mixed feelings, but Elder Naevan had been almost like a father to her, when he wasn’t travelling across the Sword Coast.

“So you did not seek out the life of a druid?”

“Yes – or no. They…I was brought up in the ways of the wild. Nature’s power was so evident that I felt no need to seek it out. It surrounded me from my earliest childhood.”

“And now you live in a castle overlooking the two greatest roads in Neverwinter’s territory.” Casavir leaned back. His blue eyes glinted in the light from the fire. “You have come a long way, Elanee of the Merdelain.”


	3. Chapter 3

Somewhere, somewhen

His first thought was that he was dead. He was kneeling in a meadow where long grasses waved in a light breeze. The sky above was silver, and woven through with violet tendrils.

Closing his eyes, he inhaled. It was strange that, being dead, he could do that; the air filling his lungs felt real enough. It smelled sweet; there must be flowers concealed amongst the grass. But surely a disembodied soul had no need to breath?

“Lord Tyr, stand me by. Guard me in the darkness, raise me through pain to glory. For I am friendless, houseless, kinless. I can bide nowhere save with you. I have no hope except from you…”

He ran through the lines of the prayer he had learned when he first joined the Church, following the path of his aunt and grandfather. He felt nothing…but sometimes that was the nature of prayer. Sometimes the words were not sufficient to lift his spirit towards the divine.

Still, he was disquieted. Trying not to hurry, he pulled off the chain-and-plate gauntlet that protected his weapon hand, so that he could rest his bare palm against the bronze Eye of Tyr that he wore as a pendant.

Nothing. Nothing at all. He could not feel the presence of his god. Not even an echo of Him.

And if that were so then – where was he? Had Tyr rejected him? He had thought his sacrifice would be acceptable. But perhaps he had erred. Perhaps he had offended his deity by claiming the death he had long contemplated before it was ready for him. What had seemed right in the darkness of the portal was…less clear now that he was back under an open sky.

Someone might have carried him out of the palace if he had only lost consciousness, and not died as he had expected. And then brought him…here? By no feat of the imagination could this landscape of undulating grassland be the Mere of Dead Men.

He tried to stand up, and felt a vicious, stinging pain in his side. He looked down. The patch of chainmail above his left hip, unguarded by cuirass and backplate, was dark with blood. A hiss escaped his lips as he pressed his hand against it. One of the golems must have caught him; in the heat of the battle it was easy to overlook injuries.

This meant, though, that he was in all probability alive. Alive, and without his god.

“Elanee?” he called as loudly as he could, then winced as the movement of his diaphragm pulled at the wound. “Zhjaeve? Lila? Jerro?”

No one. Only the breeze over the seed-heads of the grasses, and the strange sky. It reminded him of the eyes of Nolaloth, the great dragon, when he had lowered his ghostly head near to Casavir’s, and colour had momentarily seemed to flare in the translucent hollows.

Pressing his hand more firmly against his side, he rose to his feet. He shuddered, staggered, righted himself. The pain was bad, but not yet unbearable.

Moving around, careful not to twist his torso to the left or right, he took in the full wheel of his surroundings. Miles of grass and sparse trees like a hunting park. At his back, he discovered a long ridge with banks so even that it looked to have been built, rather than heaped up by the wind, or sculpted by the rain.

Seeing nothing else to do, no other feature that was worth aiming for, he set about climbing. The ridge was, he reckoned, about one thousandth of the height of Mount Galardrym, which he had once ascended in armour with heavy pack. Still, he was trembling from the effort when reached the top.

A chalky track ran along its length. There were no wagon wheel ruts, or prints from cattle hooves to show why it existed. And yet it must go somewhere… There was nothing to recommend either direction: no signs, or towers in the distance, not even a tumble-down barn.

He turned right. One of his more eccentric instructors had insisted on it during his pupillage, as part of a convoluted theology of movement, morality, and being. Although his pupillage was long over, some of the behaviours absorbed during it had proved impossible to leave behind. They could be oddly comforting; a standard to cling to when everything else was in ruins.

The surface of the track stayed level, and proved easy enough to walk along, provided that he took small steps. Despite the uncanny beauty of the sky and the whispering grasses, he soon found the walk itself monotonous. It left too much space for the wrong sort of contemplation. Any attempt to pray here could only draw more of the emptiness in.

If he had brought any supplies with him, he could have cleaned and dressed his wound. But all the potions, bandages and supplies of clean water were far away – in the chamber, or with Sand, or Elanee, wherever they were now.

She had been cornered and terrified, and he had failed to help her. At least she was alive, and perhaps safer and happier without him. Still, he wished he could see her just as she had been on Marlside that one time, calling the falcons down from the clouds to stoop and sweep around her. Or else smiling one of her fleeting sly smiles.

Eventually he came to a crossroads of sorts. Another chalk track ran across the one he was currently following, one that was also raised on the back of an embankment winding through a green sea. Seeing no reason to change his course, he continued on his original path.

Once he lifted his hand, and found it covered in blood from the nails to the wrist. Disturbed, he renewed the pressure on his side. Though the flow was not strong, it was enough to be dangerous. He knew that Elanee would tell him to lie down, slow his breathing, and bind the wound with his undershirt. But if he lay down, would he ever rise again?

In another place, it would not have mattered if he did or not. He had put everything in order before the Battle of Highcliff. Had labelled his more valuable possessions, visited his sister, played with the nephews and nieces who would bear the family line onward.

Tyr had been with him in the Illefarn Palace. Shadows had fled and turned into smoke as he had raised the Eye aloft. Where was He now?

Another crossroads appeared at his feet, exactly like the first. Narrowing his eyes against the silvery light, he scanned the countryside. Long grasses and scattered trees, just as before. Elanee would have known more; what seemed like repetition to him might have spoken with a thousand tongues to her.

Bishop would have been more capable here too. Would have found tracks by now, and pointed the way to the nearest settlement. Casavir frowned. The ranger had decided that dying at the behest of Garius would suit him as little as loyalty to Neverwinter had, and slipped away into the darkness before the start of the fight. Could this all be some trick of his devising? But Bishop would be unlikely to construct an elaborate scheme when a knife in the back could serve as well.

After looking in all directions, and finding no answers, he drew a triskelion in the dust with the toe of his boot. The breeze would soon sweep it away, he realised, so he kicked three pebbles into position to mark each of the points.

To distract himself as he walked, he began counting in elvish. He had never been an apt scholar, and stumbled when he came to the eighties and nineties. By the time he reached three thousand, even Sand might have acknowledged his improved fluency.

The blood was trickling down his fauld. There was nothing he could do about it. He considered counting backwards, since counting forwards was no longer sufficient to occupy his mind.

The third set of crossroads appeared in the distance, and drew closer. There was a triskelion in the chalk dust. He regarded it dispassionately. So all his effort had brought him back to the same place. That was fitting.

“Turn around, young man, and let me look at you.” The voice was crisp, commanding. He turned.

The first thing he saw was the horse, if horse it was. The long shape of the head was equine; yet that had to be balanced against hairless white skin that looked as hard as bone, and a mouth that opened to let out the tip of a forked tongue. Its body was higher and narrower than that of any animal he had seen in the Keep’s stables, and its neck was longer, swan-like or – in less poetic terms – serpentine.

“You don’t have a templar’s face. There’s no glow around the pupil, none of that raw sadism ill-contained. Good. Bodies are _so_ hard to dispose of here.”

The old woman mounted on the beast gazed down at him with a disdainful smile. A horned crown rested on her long silver hair, and her eyes were yellow, like a hawk’s. A dangerous omen, in his experience.

“I am not a templar, lady, nor do I know what one is. My name is Casavir. I am a servant of Tyr, and a knight of Neverwinter.”

“You seem poorly armed for a knight. Tell me, where are your sword and shield? Cast aside on the field of battle?” Her mouth formed a moue of pretend disappointment. “Surely not.”

He watched her. He could tell that she was trying to anger him, but after two years of Bishop, it would take much worse than that to make him lose his temper.

“I threw my helmet away after a spell turned its outside to molten metal. I dropped my shield so that I could swing my warhammer with both hands. The hammer itself fractured as I struck the final blow.” He drew himself up, despite the damage he felt he was doing to his side. “My lady, I won my last battle. Though I do not deny that I am lost now.”

He met her eyes, and held his gaze steady until a lunge from the un-horse distracted him. She laughed.

“Well, at least you have some backbone. When I saw you limping along the Marchers’ Way, I thought – there goes a puppet whose strings have been cut.”

That remark cut him more keenly than anything said by a stranger should have been able to. Could she know what had happened? Was it so obvious that even his bearing announced his abandonment?

“You know my name,” he said. “Will you do me the courtesy of telling me yours?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. Her features were regular, fine, possessed of a statue-like kind of perfection. In her youth she must have been a beauty, though an imperious one for sure.

“Who do you think I am?”

“A queen,” he answered frankly, “or a warlock, or a mixture of the two. But as to what you are called, or what land you hail from, I do not know. You resemble no one I have heard of on the Sword Coast.”

“Of course not! I have never set foot on your Sword Coast, or seen your Neverwinter, and if I had,” she purred, “you would certainly have heard of me.”

Casavir waited, but she only regarded him through her hawkish eyes, amused and silent. No name or country were forthcoming.

“I awoke here injured after a battle in the Mere of Dead Men. I do not know how I was brought here, and -”

“ – and you have lost your god. How careless of you.” He froze in shock. She reached down and fingered the pendant around his neck. “And eye. Let’s see – your eyes look well enough, and were never mistreated in the past, so I doubt you were the disciple of a god of eye doctors. Your appalling earnestness means you would not revere a power that devoted itself to outward looks and the worship of ephemeral impressions…”

“Justice,” he said. “My god is the guardian of justice.”

“Of course he is…” she dropped the pendant. It bounced off his armour with a light _tink_. “Well, you would find many kindred spirits in my land. They are much practised in the business of misplacing their deities.” She gave a sour smile.

“What land is that, lady?” He felt tremendously weary. It had been a mistake to rise from the grass when he first found himself in this strange country.

“Follow me, and I will take you there.” Without waiting for a reply, she nudged her monstrous horse into a trot. “But stop pretending to be injured,” she said over her shoulder. “Once we leave the Marchers’ Way, your imaginary wound will become very real. And that will make you much less useful!”

She tugged the reins sharply to the left, and her steed followed their pull. Casavir brought his fingers to his nose, inhaling the unmistakable tang of blood. Where it had dried, it matched the colour of the old woman’s pleated gown.

If he let her go, he would be alone again under the silver-violet sky. She looked much like the kind of being he was bound to oppose…a predator in human skin. Yet he did not want to be alone. The iron courage that had embraced him underneath the Mere had rusted all away.

Renewing the pressure on his side, he turned left, and walked after her.

The bone horse shook its tail, which was slender and fleshless like a rat’s. and moved into a canter. He forced himself to jog. No easy matter in full armour with blood trickling down his leg. A few spear-lengths down the track, his lungs wheezed, and he coughed up blood-specked sputum.

Then the woman kicked the horse’s flanks, and heighed it on. It galloped.

“Can you run, young man?” The mocking words floated to him across the hundred yards that separated them. She threw her head back and laughed.

He had not been a young man for years. Not since joining the dalefolk in the mountains. Nevertheless…

His heart thudding, the wound sinking its teeth into his flesh, he sped up. He reckoned he could keep going to a hundred yards. The weight of his armour became agonizing, and he slashed his estimate to thirty.

After two hundred yards, he could barely see for sweat. The horse was still ahead of him, the gap between them staying the same, despite its long legs and bounding gait. Two tall pines stood at either side of the track. He had barely registered that they existed, and that it was the first time pines had appeared in the unchanging scenery, before he was through, and past them, and lying on his face in the cold dirt.

He rolled onto his back. Lush foliage criss-crossed the sky above him. Branches of trees with diamond-shaped leaves, and others that were wrapped about with creepers. He turned his head to the side and coughed up more phlegm. When it had stopped being difficult too breath, the pale blue sky drew his attention. It was a normal shade of blue; no silver or violet shades were to be seen.

Slowly, one awkward movement after another, he got back to his feet. Wiped his face where the sweat was chilling his brow and cheeks, and no doubt left a bloody handprint behind. In a spasm of hope, he clutched his pendant. Since he had left the land of grass meadows, perhaps… Still, there was nothing.

There was no chalk track for him to follow, but a narrow trail of pressed earth threatened on all sides by undergrowth and briars did lead away through the trees. Here and there were the impressions of a horse’s hoofprints. Low branches tangled in his hair as he moved along it; any attempt to weave or dodge them made the pain from the wound redouble. It was easier to let the thorns graze his skin, and the twigs snap against his shoulder guards.

The air, even sheltered among the trees, was much sharper than it would have been at harvestide in Neverwinter. He felt feverish. The temptation to crawl under the bushes and sleep grew stronger. But it was a temptation he was well-practised at resisting. The Sword Mountains had been a brutal tutor, in that respect.

Soon, the trees became shorter, and more widely spaced. Bushes receded, and a burn ran by the path, rattling over a bed of small, flat stones; the kind that he had hoarded as a child so that he could skip them across Ravenhall Bay. His sister had always managed to skip her stones more times than him. If they ever had a rematch, she would certainly win another resounding victory.

As the burn flowed into a reed-edged pool, he stopped, and realised that he was looking at a house. It blended so well into the landscape that he had failed to see it until he was almost upon it, for all that it extended over two floors, and had a high, sheer roof. The materials were homely ones: a mixture of timber struts and dried clay. Still, smoke rose from a simple metal pipe. The smell of a woodfire had always brought solace to him.

The girl next to the door looked much less welcoming. She was young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, and dressed in clothes that seemed designed for a much warmer climate. She had pale skin, dark hair, a small angry mouth, and was pointing a twisted black branch towards him in a manner she seemed to think was threatening.

He held up his hands. One was covered in blood, so might give the wrong impression, but the meaning of the gesture was clear enough to be understandable everywhere: he was unarmed; he posed no danger.

The girl waved the stick. A ball of white light and glittering flakes shot out, and struck him on the breastplate. Rime spread across the metal, then faded. He touched a finger cautiously against the point of impact, and raised it again, feeling a slight chill around the tip and nail. He had not been hit by an ice spell for some time.

“That was very impressive,” he said politely, attempting to mitigate the dismay and anger that were written in her face. “I am sorry if I frightened you. That was not my intention. Would you fetch your parents, please?”

She stared at him blankly, then frowned. He thought she might be softening towards him, but then she snapped out a few words in a completely unfamiliar language. And then turned into a bear.

A moderately-sized black bear. That must mean the girl was a druid of some sort. It rose on its hind legs and roared at him.

Casavir considered what to do. If the bear charged, it would be easy to arrange matters so that they traded places; even in his current state, he could do that. But if he escaped into the house, there was every possibility that its other inhabitants would be just as ill-disposed towards strangers as the girl. Nor could he explain himself, not if their languages were alien to each other.

The bear roared again. He took a step back, not believing that it would alleviate the girl’s temper, but ready to try. He did not want to hurt her under any circumstances. The memory of what he had been forced to do to Qara to make her stop…it was sickening. Rather than go through that again, he would die.

“Stop your foolery, girl.” The old woman had appeared beside the house. On foot, and without her bone horse. “Can’t you see he’s not a templar? I certainly didn’t bring you up to eat our guests. Not the interesting ones, at least.”

The girl stepped out of the bear’s shadow, which blanched into nothing. All sullen shuffling and pouting, she muttered something in her foreign tongue. He was sure that it meant: ‘I don’t see what’s so interesting about _him_ ’.

“Go and make yourself useful. Make up a bed for him near the fire, and roast some bread and fat.” When the girl had entered the house, letting the door slam noisily behind her, the old woman turned to him. “Well, young man, do you still think I’m a queen? What do you think of my palace and chamberlain?”

Her voice was the same. The lines of her face too were unchanged, as high and haughty as they had been at the crossroads. But the gown of burnt umber and the horned crown had vanished: in their place, she wore a peasant woman’s dress, and her hair hung in uncombed strings around her thin cheeks.

“I like the palace better than any other I have seen,” he answered with complete truthfulness. He had seen two palaces: one was in Neverwinter, and the other was the ancient demesne of the Guardian. “And of the chamberlains I have known, few would not have wished to be able to transform themselves into a fierce beast to deter visitors.”

She raised her eyebrows. “A diplomatic answer. How disappointing.”

“I was trained from boyhood to seek for diplomatic solutions to problems, lady.”

“Ah, so _I_ am a problem? Gratifying. To be a problem is always my preference. So much better than to be a footstool.” Her yellow eyes blinked once. She folded her arms. “Yet the armour and over-sized shoulders do not speak to me of a life lived through diplomatic channels.”

“They can add weight to discussions.”

“Hmm. I’m sure. People are never so willing to agree on a peaceful solution than when they fear they will get the worst of an unpeaceful one.” It did not matter if she wore a gown or homespun dress; he was sure she was a queen of some sort, in her nature if not in her rank. Whether she was a demonic power like Blooden, or a power broker like Ophala, he could not say.

“You still have not told me your name.” Despite the pale blue sky and sunlight, he was beginning to feel very cold indeed. Colder than when the girl’s little ice cantrip had struck him.

“Flemeth is my name. The Chasind and the town dwellers to the north call me the Witch of the Wilds. For that is where you are now, man of Neverwinter. You are in the Korcari Wilds, south of the Kingdom of Ferelden.”

Casavir nodded, then swayed on his feet before his sense of balance could reassert itself. “I am in another world.” He allowed no hint of a question into his tone. Nevertheless, he raised his eyes to hers, looking for the confirmation of his belief.

Flemeth’s lips moved upwards. “You’re not as slow as you look, are you? And how did you make this deduction?”

At that, Casavir wished Sand was with him. The alchemist’s reflexive sarcasm rarely improved situations in the long-term; in the short-term, a choice remark about violet clouds and bone lizard rat horses would have been very welcome.

“I was schooled in all the known lands and regions of Toril.” He had learned them, then forgotten them: most were merely the words on a page, never to be visited and of no consequence. “Ferelden was not among them. Nor was Korcari. I did not recognise the language the young woman spoke. More importantly, she did not seem to recognise the language I spoke, though it was the common tongue that is known across the world…across my world.”

He could not say any more. His vision blurred. That meant –

All sense of what was up and what was down disappeared into a spiral of pulsing black lines. He collapsed.

“Stubborn boy,” said the husky voice of Flemeth as the world went black. “I told you to leave your wound behind. Yet some people cling to their injuries like misers to gold.”

Everything became very quiet. The sounds of battle clashed suddenly and violently in his ears, then died away. And he was cold, so cold, and blind. Soon the poisoned water of the Mere would rise up over him. “Elanee – I cannot –“

“Sleep,” commanded Flemeth. “There will be work enough for you to do very soon.”


	4. Chapter 4

1376 – Eleint

Flames licked at the base of the trunks in the little orchard she had once helped Shandra plant. The windows of the Phoenix Tail has been smashed. Here and there bodies were lying around, half-in, half-out of their armour.

There had been no difficulty in getting into the bailey. She’d thought she might have to transform back into a thrush, and fly over the walls. But the gate had still been hanging askew on its hinges, the portcullis was still a space surrounded by jagged pieces of metal, and no guards watched from the walls or peered through arrow slits in the gatehouse.

She didn’t need her spell of camouflage, but cast it anyway. It looked as if there had been a second, overwhelming attack after she and her associates had departed for the Mere. She crouched beside one of the corpses, and gave it a prod. The corpse groaned and clutched its head.

“Urgh…lea’ m’alone…”

Straightening, she wrinkled her nose. The man’s clothes stank of urine. Another soldier was lying slumped in a pool of his own vomit. Despite having lived in a tavern in the Neverwinter docks, she hadn’t been used to seeing that kind of total dissipation. Sal or Duncan had generally arranged for their troublesome customers to be taken home or put to bed before they reached that level of abandon.

What surprised her most was that no one was doing anything about them. No sergeants were having them ducked in the horse trough, or carried back to barracks. Everything was as quiet as if it was the hour before dawn in midwinter.

But none of this was her concern. She needed Ivarr.

The door of the temple was locked. She was about to knock when a murmuring from the far side of the building caught her ears. She followed the sound, careful to stay close to the wall where her camouflage would be more powerful.

The temporary mortuary and infirmary had been set up in the remotest corner of the bailey. Two days ago, she’d spent a tortuous night racing between the troops on the walls and grey-faced soldiers stretched out on pallets in closely-packed rows, their feet nearly touching the feet of their dead comrades.

It was there, underneath an awning added since the battle, that she found Ivarr. His hands were folded in prayer over a line of stretchers. Sheets and blankets covered the long forms laid out on them. As his soft prayer came to an end, a group of soldiers – garrison soldiers, unlike the drunks in the forecourt – lifted the stretchers, and fell into a slow procession, walking with measured steps towards the postern gate. Ivarr followed them.

Could she draw him away before he went beyond the walls to oversee the cremations? Casavir had been his friend. Surely a friend would take precedence over these empty ceremonials.

But Casavir wouldn’t have wanted them interrupted, she knew. He would say that as long as they brought comfort to the funeral train, to the Keep’s Greycloaks in their freshly-burnished armour, they were important. That the observance of the rituals around death was another means of affirming the value of life.

So she waited till the postern gate closed behind the last of the sad little group before making her way into the castle itself. Even within, there were clear signs of the riotous celebrations that had apparently taken place. Several more soldiers were slumped unconscious in corners; she noted that most wore the crescent moon of Waterdeep on their tunics. Tapestries had been torn down, the old throne in the main hall had been hacked until one half was only splinters, primitive drawings and scrawls covered the walls.

By the time she reached her bedroom on the first floor, she was prepared for the scene that awaited her. The door had been forced. Inside, her books lay scattered across the floor, and her chest of possessions had been opened and rifled through. Most strikingly, a male human was lying on her bed, asleep, naked, and snoring. An empty bottle lay next to his hand.

She was revolted. A few days ago, it would have felt worse: it would have been a violation. A defilement. This morning, she had no capacity left for more emotion. She would be cool and resolute, as she needed to be. If only she could have felt so calm in the last battle…

Her control briefly slipping, she clenched her hands behind her back into fists. She willed herself away from those thoughts; they couldn’t help her, and wouldn’t change anything.

Her bedroom in the Keep was no longer a place of retreat and safety. She shouldn’t have gone there, anyway. It was instinct and habit that had brought her back to its threshold. Who else might help her while Ivarr was occupied? Startear had jumped through a portal the moment an undead horde arrived at the gate. If he lived, then Sand was a possibility; Zhjaeve too.

Elanee brightened at the thought of speaking to the githzerai again. The priestess’s understanding seemed to reach much greater depths than that of anyone else she’d met. She saw without walls, freely, as Elanee wished she could do. With such profound knowledge of the workings of the planes, and life, and death, surely Zhjaeve could direct her to the road that had Casavir at its end?

She wandered back through the castle, letting her camouflage spell slip. Her fear of immediate arrest and execution was fading; in fact, was starting to seem absurd. Almost. She’d heard about what had happened to Fenthick Moss.

At the door of the library, she stopped. It was shut tight. Within, she was sure, there was a person, or people. The space beyond the wooden boards was not only occupied by paper and dried ink. Who would it be? Aldanon?

She knocked quietly. Another soldier was lying in a drunken stupor at the far end of the corridor; it would be preferable for them both if he continued sleeping.

No one answered her knock. There was no shout of acknowledgement, no scrape of a chair being pushed back across stone tiles. She raised her hand, about to knock harder, when the door was pulled wide open.

“Another survivor! One more and we’ll have enough alumni of the Merdelain for a game of Tura.”

Sand was sitting at the table behind a chessboard and a glass of something that looked golden and alcoholic. His face was strained.

“Or a gnomish triadic dance,” said Harcourt, as he closed the door behind Elanee and bolted it. Aldanon’s secretary scratched his unshaven chin, observing her through dark eyes that were bloodshot with sleeplessness.

“Did you say triadic or tribadic, dear boy?”

“I wouldn’t really know, Sand. It’s not my area of expertise, you understand.” Harcourt answered the alchemist in an ironic drawl. When he turned back to her, he spoke in the tone she recognised from his clean-cut daytime manners. “I’m sorry, Elanee. I should have asked – do you want a drink? I would offer you food, but Sand ate it all.”

“I object to your unconscionable defamation of my character. I will see you in court, young man!” Sand was examining an ebony rook as if it could tell him the secrets of the existence.

“Still true though,” said Harcourt with a grin. She thought that Sand was really very drunk; she had never seen him the worse for alcohol before. It was both unnerving and inconvenient. The chaos beyond the library must have infected him too.

She didn’t reply to Harcourt’s offer. Going straight to Sand, she took the chair opposite him. The abundance of white pieces on her side of the board suggested that he was not winning his match.

“A feint,” said Sand. “I assure you, I am only pretending to lose.” If he’d noticed the direction of her gaze, perhaps he wasn’t that inebriated after all. Good.

“What happened to Casavir?” The question burst out, simple and unprettified by words of concern for the rodentine mage, or anyone else.

Sand leant back in his chair, his fingers still playing with the ebony rook. She was afraid that he was going to withhold his knowledge from her. The kind of mean power-play she knew he was capable of.

“I don’t know, Elaníae,” he said, using an elven form of her name. “You see, you were not the only guest to leave the dinner early. Let us say that while you sated your appetite on the plates of olives and lukewarm soup, I stayed until dessert. At that point, I felt obliged to throw down my napkin, and depart the banqueting hall.”

One thin hand snaked towards the glass of gold liqueur. She captured the glass, and held it hostage. “What was he doing when you last saw him? Was he well?”

Sand widened his eyes, as if hurt. “Really,” he said plaintively, “there is no need to cross-examine me. I have no wish nor possible motive to hide the truth from you.”

He lunged towards the glass. She held it further away, and he only succeeded in sending some of his own chess pieces flying.

“That’s three games in a row to me,” observed Harcourt.

“The fourth will answer them all.” Sand slumped back in his chair. All of a sudden, he looked more tired than she’d ever seen him. “Casavir was in good health before I teleported out of the chamber. He had climbed into the portal to attack it from the inside. Jerro followed him.

“My last view of the scene was of Khelgar and Neeshka, both as demented as ever, keeping the avatar distracted while Lila tried to sever the connection between it and the portal. Zhjaeve was staying back, providing her particular kind of support. Since we do not appear to be a pair of little shadows paddling round your malodorous homeland, we must assume that one or other of our friends was successful.”

“Indeed we must,” said Harcourt. With a nimbleness she hadn’t known he possessed, he plucked the glass from her hand, and returned it to its owner. Then he positioned himself behind Sand’s chair, the casualness of his stance failing to disguise a certain protectiveness. The look that he short at her was admonitory.

She stayed completely still for a few moments, gathering her thoughts. Sand and Harcourt each looked lost in their own.

The oil lamp on Aldanon’s desk guttered and died.

“Scry for him,” she said. Sand blanched.

“ _Now_?”

“Yes. Scry for him _now_ ,” she repeated, “and I will leave you alone to distract yourself with games and drink yourself into oblivion. Until then, I’m not moving.”

“In that case, I will simply return to my bedroom.”

“Please do. Brambles and a few poisonous spiders will improve the decoration, won’t they? Did you know, the deadliest spiders are often the smallest? You don’t even know they’re there until it’s too late.”

Sand eyed her sourly. A nervous tic began in his cheek. Previously, it had only manifested itself when Qara was speaking. She felt no guilt. Her behaviour was so far from her usual reserve that she felt almost a foreigner to herself. But she did not doubt for a heartbeat that the change was necessary.

“I’ll do it,” said Harcourt. “I have before.”

“Dear boy, I had no idea you could – it’s a subtle skill.” Sand’s tone for once implied no slight. There was real pleasure in it.

The secretary ran a hand through his hair, and gave a boyish grin. “How else d’you think I keep track of Aldanon’s spectacles?”

His eyes were much less glazed than Sand’s. Even if he couldn’t match his companion’s powers, that he was sober and willing to aid her without being bullied into it was all the recommendation she needed.

“Good. Do it.” She paused. “Please. Casavir fought to save everyone. He deserves our help now.”

She ignored the scepticism of Sand’s raised eyebrow, and focused on Harcourt. The young man nodded in a business-like way, and set about gathering the materials he needed from around the room.

First, he removed a large-framed scroll depicting the continents of Abeir-Toril from the only expanse of wall not covered by bookcases.

“Clear the table, please.” To her surprise, Sand began obediently dropping chess pieces into a bag after folding the board in two. He missed the bag a few times, but persevered. She couldn’t wait for him to finish. She snatched up the stray pawns and bishops from the floor, and added them to the bag, then dropped both it and the board on the dusty shelf they’d come from. No one had been much in the mood for the game over the last few months; meaning, she supposed, that Grobnar would never be displaced as the Keep’s reigning champion.

Harcourt deposited the heavy map on the table, leaving her sitting at the Utter South, and Sand north of the Great Glacier. All the lands of the world spread out before her. She thought that she despised them all, yet was prepared to love any one of them with a patriotic fervour if it was shown to contain Casavir, alive and well.

The preparations continued. Harcourt quickly retrieved two beeswax candles, lighting them and giving one to Sand, and the other to her. Around the western and eastern edges of the map, he placed a collection of seemingly random objects: a quill pen, a stick of charcoal, Sand’s glass of gold liqueur, another candle, an oil lamp, a knot of tangled string, and an astrolabe. After rifling around in Aldanon’s desk, he returned with a piece of chalk, and marked eight lines on the north-east section of the table, and eight lines on the south-west. Finally, he broke the chalk in two, and with each half he scrawled a line in a rough semi-circle over the polished wood.

“The Zakharan system,” remarked Sand. “How full of surprises you are!”

“I never learned to scry the conventional way. Regardless, this should work better for our purposes.”

Reaching to the nape of his neck, he unhooked a fine chain that she hadn’t realised he’d been wearing. Something glinted as it slid free of the chain. Harcourt twirled it between his fingers, then brought it to his mouth.

It was a large silver coin with a hole bored through its centre.

The spell was beginning. Harcourt pressed the coin against his lips, and muttered a string of breathy, guttural syllables. He was not a showy magician; sparks didn’t shoot from his hands; the air didn’t sizzle with power. He went about his casting as an engineer would, methodical and precise.

He touched each of the objects on the table in turn, murmuring each time a few words; each time she heard the sound _hefoch_ preceding everything else. An unknown word for an unknown ritual. She shivered. Her stomach lurched in dull anticipation.

Harcourt rested the edge of the coin at the centre of the map, on the north-west corner of Kara-Tur.

He shot a sideways look at her. “We’ll do a test first.”

As he flicked his wrist, and set the coin spinning on the spot, he said in a clear voice, “ _Akir_ Sand.”

“If you really must…” the alchemist murmured.

The spinning coin drew her eyes to it like a spindle winding yarn. The speed of the revolutions slowed, and slowed. She waited for them to fail, and for the coin to fall flat. Just at the last moment, as all the energy Harcourt’s twist had created dissipated, it stayed standing on its edge and shuddered. A line of green the colour of old bronze traced wild contours over the metallic surface. As if it had some to a decision, the trembling stopped, and the line faded. The coin, solid, slow and inexorable, rolled over the map; travelling north-west, it crossed the Sea of Fallen Stars, and continued over the High Forest and the Sword Mountains, until it came to a decisive stop a short way from the western coast of Faerun.

“North of the Merdelain, and south of Neverwinter Wood.” Sand already seemed to be emerging from his alcoholic haze. He was reading the map upside-down with ease, and restored alertness. “Perfect.”

Harcourt lowered his dark lashes in modest acknowledgement of the praise. Deep inside her, Elanee felt a twinge of something that was neither pain nor grief, and certainly not desire. It she gave it a shape, it would be a fallen tree, rotting from within, and with deathcaps letting their mycelia twine through the damp timber.

The faint smile of a craftsman pleased with his work faded on the secretary’s face as he picked up the coin once more. Again, he set it down in the centre of the map.

“ _Akir_ Casavir.”

Sand jerked forward in his chair, making the flame of his candle sputter. She shot him the most venomous look she could muster; his eyes were set on the spinning coin, and he paid her no mind. She willed herself to look too, feeling sick.

The spinning of the coin slowed. Soon it rotated enough for her to see the pattern of vine-leaves embossed around its border. It had been years since she’d felt discomfort from being in a room instead of the wild, but right then, the walled pressed in on her as much as they had when she’d spent her first night in the _Flagon._ She couldn’t breathe.

“Does that mean…?” Sand began. The coin was still standing on its edge. It was completely inert.

She watched Harcourt’s mouth move. She heard the words, but their meaning escaped her. They were like his incantations, sound without significance.

When she was able to focus again, Sand was speaking.

“Try Shandra. Use her as a control.”

“Dead too long. Souls forget quickly in most circumstances. Especially the happier ones.” Harcourt pursed his lips. Coming to a sudden decision, he flicked the coin into another spin. “ _Akir_ Grobnar.”

This time, the coin rolled in a double figure of eight around the map, touching every sea and continent as if on a tour of the world, before departing to settle on one of the chalk marks on the table.

“Bytopia, I believe,” said Sand.

“One of the better places to be,” said Harcourt, “if one cannot live in Neverwinter, of course.” He paused, and added, “I hope there are golems where he is.”

“Let us not neglect to mention Wendersnaven, and globes full of powerful explosives.” The two men exchanged a confiding smile, sharing a deeper joke that she didn’t understand.

“So what does it mean?” she said, interrupting whatever was going on between them. “He’s not in the planes, and he’s not here either?”

Harcourt shook his head. “I don’t know.” His voice was gentle. She didn’t want the sympathy she heard there.

She sat numbly as they scryed for Lila Farlong. The coin rolled between the astrolabe and a land far to the east of Neverwinter. It seemed unable to settle; if anything, it’s speed increased as travelled backwards and forwards in ever more frenzied laps. Harcourt was forced to capture it between finger and thumb, and lift it away.

“The Astral Plane and…Rashemen, I think.” Sand frowned. “What trouble has our peerless captain got herself into now? To be in two planes of existence at once is simply too much, even for her.”

“I’m glad you’re not in the middle of it,” said Harcourt. He took a sip of Sand’s liqueur, and made a face. “Blegh.”

“Is that not supposed to be the Plane of Water?”

Harcourt shrugged, and took a swig. “Well, it was. That’s enough scrying for the present. I once blacked out after looking for Gith with the same technique. I think it worked too, except that I knocked the coin away as I fell over…”

Elanee breathed in, and drew herself up in her chair. “No. Find Jerro. He followed Casavir into the portal. I want to know where he is.”

Harcourt drained the last of the liqueur, and set the glass back on the table with a firm _chink_. “Your wish is my command. For my part, I hope he’s burning in the hells.”

He returned the coin to its starting position, and raised his wrist. The muscles in his hand tenses.

“Wait – stop!” Sand snapped, his eyes wide as he reached out to snatch the coin away. Too late. The coin span once. That was enough. The map burst into flames.

Harcourt cried out in horror, and made as if to reach into the fire to retrieve his coin from the hottest part of the blaze, where the reds and yellows shaded into blue.

Sand jumped up, and knocked Harcourt’s arm away. “Elanee! Ice!” he hissed at her.

She stared back, not comprehending or caring much. The mage shook his head in disgust.

“Harcourt, please be still. I can put out the fire, or stop you from incinerating yourself, but not both.”

The secretary nodded. Sand turned and, with a wave of his hand, spread a sheet of ice over the flames. They died down, occasionally giving a scornful flicker as if to say that they were going of their own volition, and not perforce through hostile magic.

Harcourt used the nib of a pen to scratch a layer of soot from a round disc in the centre of the scorched table. Silver glinted from under a crust of blackened ash.

“I think it’s intact,” said Harcourt in relief. “Mystra be praised. I’d have been sorry to lose it.”

“So is he dead then?” Elanee asked, ignoring his attempts to slide the coin away from the debris without burning himself on the hot metal.

“Unfortunately not,” said Harcourt.

“He’s a man well-versed in enchantments to repel divination,” Sand explained. “I should have recalled that at once. We should consider ourself fortunate that a map was the only casualty.”

“A valuable map, as well as part of an antique oak table.”

“Indeed. Happily, I think Kana will be ready to blame the damage on the Waterdhavians…”

“We were never here, is what you’re saying?”

She heard the grin in Harcourt’s voice. She didn’t see it, being already occupied with drawing the bolt back on the door, and slipping out into the corridor. The mage and secretary could be of no more help. Next she needed to speak to Ivarr. Then…the idea of where she had to go was already a looming shadow at the back of her mind. The more she became attuned to it, the more certain her path felt.

In the main hall, a couple of Greycloaks were dragging away one of the prone soldiers. One of them she vaguely recognised as belonging to the Arvahn party; she kept her head down and hurried past so that he wouldn’t notice her, and demand to know what she was doing and what had happened to the others.

More Greycloaks were upright and moving about in the bailey. Three were standing by the fruit trees, watching glumly as they burned into black stumps. She drew her camouflage back around her, and slipped past them all. The temple door was open. She entered; after wandering around the central chamber, and brushing her fingers against the bench where Casavir had sometimes sat in order to contemplate a painted allegory, she found the side-door that led to a plain vestry, and the accommodation of Ivarr.

The blonde dwarf was sitting at his desk, a cup of liquorice tea nursed in both hands. He was reading a page from a large tome that lay open before him. He was one of the few dwarves she knew that she also liked. There was something undemanding about his presence, as if he felt she was good enough just as she was. And he’d been friends with Casavir. That meant she could trust him.

Ivar took off his reading glass, and put them on the desk. The movement was calm, unhurried; still, she could feel the tension behind the mildness. Today was no regular day. This morning was no common morning.

“Elanee, my dear. You had better sit down.”

She followed his suggestion, perching on the edge of a padded stool. Without waiting for the imminent questions, she sketched out what she knew of events in the Merdelain, using her experience, and Sand’s report. She didn’t hide that she had fled; she had no wish to deceive someone so kind and wise.

When she had finished, the dwarf cleric closed his eyes.

“I am sorry, Elanee. Such terrible victories are hard to bear. Cruelly hard.”

“I – yes --” Her throat was tight; invisible claws were pressing against her neck. She bit her lip till the feeling receded.

“He was a remarkable man; you know that more than anyone else. An ideal, in many ways, though I am sure he would have been the first to protest the contrary.”

“Yes…” she wiped a few stray tears from her cheeks. “But, Brother,” she said, addressing him as a Tyrran would, though she was not of his faith, “don’t you think he could have survived? He may have been caught in the Cusgava when the roof fell…” She used the druids’ word for the Shadow Plane, knowing that Ivarr would understand it without explanation. Ivarr paused before answering. He rested his right palm on the pages of his book, as if drawing strength from it.

“It is possible…still, the shadowland is an awful place. Especially for a man of Casavir’s fine nature. I would almost wish him dead rather than trapped there.”

“Is there no way to discover where he is? Where his soul resides? When a druid in the Circle dies, we pray, and Silvanus leaves us a sign so that we know their fate…”

After Kaleil’s bloody end, she had prayed and prayed. For a whole week, she thought she’d received no answer, till walking round the side of the Flagon one morning, she’d found the wall overgrown with lichen. The lichen had picked out a hybrid face, half-bear, half-man. In both animal and man, she’d recognised her friend’s most marked qualities: his strength, his bravery, and his capacity for hare-brained impulsiveness. And the deeper message written into the picture, which only she could understand, was that now Silvanus knew him too, just as she once had.

“I can pray – but in what fashion and when, or if, my god chooses to answer – I do not know.” He rose from his chair. He was tall by the standards of his kind, and quite slender. “Wait a little, my dear. By tradition though not doctrine, the division between this land and the godsheim are at their thinnest around the inner sanctum. I will make my petition there.”

Elanee nodded. She sat up straight on the edge of the stool, hands folded in her lap, legs crossed underneath her. Bookshelves lined the opposite wall. Some of the titles were religious; some were related to Ivarr’s vocation, and had titles like _Fifty Homilies for Busy Clerics_ A large quantity seemed to be completely secular. She even saw one of the dragon-and-sorceress romances she’d read in Neverwinter.

That seemed a long time ago. Why was it that life in the Circle had passed so quickly that she’d been able to look back through decades as if they’d all been her yesterdays, and the three years since leaving seemed best measured in the age of rock? Did that mean that she’d been happiest in the fogs of the Mere, shielded from the tumult of this new frenzied and fraught existence?

But there had been pools of calm in it. The early morning watch near the Duskwood when Casavir had joined her, saying he couldn’t sleep. He’d talked about his family; there was a sister, nieces and nephews, parents who were the directors of a mercantile company, other relatives in the Church of Tyr.

It was unexpected. She’d always imagined that he was an orphan like her, a foundling given up to the charge of a religious order as an infant. Viewing him as an off-shoot of a successful clan of merchants, administrators and divines, the back-bone of Neverwinter, didn’t change her impression of his nature. Casavir was who he was; the purity of his temperament was the same, whether he was a penniless nobody or a beloved son. But the new knowledge had made him seem more different…more alien again.

In return for his family, she’d been able to give him little. There were no relations she could tell him about. She didn’t want to speak of the Circle. How Kaleil was dead. How when Vashne had joined, brought by Naevan from the south, her mentor had advised her never to be left alone with him. In the end, she’d told him about Naloch.

“I found him as cub, eating rotten cabbage from a midden in West Harbour. Someone had hurt him – he couldn’t use one of his hind legs at all. I nursed him back to health, and he stayed with me then.”

Casavir had fed bits of bread and cheese to the adult badger.

“He likes you,” she’d said. “He won’t let others come near him, not even for food.”

“Abused creatures are often so. They unlearn trust when their trust has been broken. It is very hard to repair such damage.”

He had made a point of feeding Naloch regularly after that. In the last weeks of the badger’s life, he’d even been able to pet him. His care for her friend had surprised her; she’d thought all Tyrrans viewed the natural world as an inconvenience at best, and a moral threat at worst.

Ivarr reappeared. He moved as quietly as a wolf in the woods. She watched every step as he returned to his seat. Although not needing them for reading, he picked his glasses up, wedged them onto the bridge of his nose, then took them off again.

“Brother?”

Ivarr sighed. “My dear.” He turned his glasses over and over without looking at them. His gaze was on her.

“Did you receive an answer?”

“I…believe so.” He looked very solemn.

“Please – tell me. I need to know.”

He lowered his eyes. “I began with a general prayer for the dead. Then another for the soldiers who fell here.

“There are always candles alight in the sanctum, and fire in the brazier. I’m sure you’ve noticed. When I began the prayer for Casavir, as soon as I uttered his name, the fire sank down into the coals, and the candle-flames all died.”

She stared at him, then sprang up and ran to the open gate of the inner sanctum. All was as Ivarr had said. The candles smoked; the coals glowed with heat, but no fire danced among them. The priest joined her.

“What does it _mean_?” Her plea echoed round the temple. She hadn’t meant to raise her voice.

“I do not know with any certainty. I have heard of such a thing happening twice before. In the first instance, a colleague of mine prayed for the rest of Aribeth the Betrayer. The second occurrence I heard about from an army cleric.

“A young squire took his own life after experiencing some kind of crisis of faith on the frontier. Naturally, the cleric prayed for the poor boy’s soul, but the only answer he ever received was…this. His fear was that the boy had been condemned along with those of the Faithless.”

“Casavir was not faithless!” The horror of the notion – that fate striking him of all men – it was too much for her. It couldn’t be true. “He was very near to his god when I last saw him. Shadows fled at a look from him. He scarcely had to raise his symbol. He had not lost his faith. He was _illuminated_ by it.”

Ivarr clasped his hands around hers. They were rough, despite his scholarliness. “I believe you, Elanee.” He smiled, though only with the lips. “It does me good to think of him so. Driving back the slaves of a malignant, corrupting force with the grace of the Just God.”

She pulled her hands free, and walked up to the brazier in the sanctum. There was a prohibition on all save senior members of the Church from entering the holiest place in their temples. Nevertheless, Ivarr did not try to stop her.

“The coals are glowing,” she called back to him. “That must be a sign. It has to be a sign.”

“I wish it were, Elanee,” the dwarf responded unhappily. “But I’m afraid that the Lord of Justice would be loathe to extinguish his own everlasting flame. Even a representation of it.”

She glared down into the brazier. Of the coals, some were black, and others whitened with head; several were orange and flaking at the edges. Two near the centre drew her attention. They had turned a pure amber; no fleck of black remained on them. From the shape, and the way they rested a little apart from each other amidst the rest of the embers, they reminded her of eyes. Large, reptilian ones. As she leaned closer, letting the heat scorch her skin, the centre of each coal seemed to peel back, revealing a dark, smouldering line, like a vent in the side of a volcano.

Smoke made her blink, and cough. The lines vanished. There were no otherworldly eyes to be seen. She was just looking at a basket of heated coals.

Her skin feeling as if it was being spit-roasted, she retreated from the brazier, and from the inner sanctum.

“Did you see something there, Elanee?”

“Only charcoal and ash.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It wasn’t you that left him. You have nothing to regret.” Her legs felt feeble again. She hit her thigh hard with her fist, not caring that Ivarr could see what she was doing. She needed her body to obey her mind, not her heart.

“We all have regrets. Terrible ones, in some cases. But we cannot let them consume us. Contrary to popular opinion, Tyr has little use for hairshirts.”

“I am not a Tyrran.” She understood what Ivarr was trying to say; it was too early for it. Much too early.

“No…but the man you loved was.” She couldn’t bear the pity in his voice, still less the awful word _was_. She raised her chin; her anger flared. “Thank you for your help, Brother. Pray for him.” At the door of the temple, she hesitated. “I’m going to find him.”

“I hope you do with all my heart. May Tyr watch over your path.”

She left the temple, leaving the door open behind her, and went to the stables. She passed Casavir’s destrier and Zhjaeve’s bay gelding to reach the corner where her pony had its stall. Poor Hevin had been left without hay or fresh water. Quickly, she remedied both lacks.

After drinking his fill, the chestnut pony sniffed her hands with his soft, whiskery nose. She patted his neck. Then, although she knew the gesture meant nothing to his species, she laid her arms around his neck. “ _Ahanich wela’i nai vider, car_ _é_ ,” she muttered into his ear. “Be happy, friend.”

She hurried away while she could still bear to. Who would look after Hevin now? Should she have turned him loose? But the proud little horse had never lived in the wild. His only herd was here. He was captive born and bred.

Outside the gates, a couple of Greycloaks had taken up position. The castle was once again guarded.

“Look after the horses,” she told them. “They need feeding and exercising.”

The younger of the two saluted. “Right away, ma’am.”

As she walked away on the rutted track, which was still covered by pieces of exploded siege tower from the battle, she registered the muttered conversation taking place behind her. Humans always underestimated elven hearing.

“Who in the hells was that?” said the older voice.

“Oh, that was Farlong’s tame druid. She lives here, or used to.”

“Pretty little thing.”

“Sure, but away with the fairies most of the time. Aloof, you know?”

“Ah, like _that_.”

It didn’t matter what they thought. She had a task to complete.

As she passed the charred ruins of a farmhouse, she spread her wings again. The air currents were favourable. After rising straight up so that she was level with the top of the nearest tree, and then higher still, until the towers of Crossroad Keep shrank to the size of mud huts, she began her long journey east, to Rashemen.


	5. Chapter 5

The Korcari Wilds, 9:28 Dragon

He came around slowly. Wherever he was, he felt warm, safe. He could hear a fire crackling. The naked flesh of his back was resting against something soft and yielding. It was even more comfortable than his bed in the Keep.

His right hand stirred the surface beneath him. An animal pelt, as silky as rabbit fur but much thicker. Scents of smoke and meat and herbs and seasoned wood vied invitingly for his attention.

It would be a shame to open his eyes. For once, everything felt right. He felt right. Peaceful.

But his deep sleep was drawing away. Full consciousness loomed. He reached for his pendant. Fingers touched nothing but the cool skin on his collarbone.

That juddered him wide awake. His eyes snapped open. The ceiling above him was unplastered: wooden boards resting on heavy beams. To his right, they were blackened. He dropped his gaze.

The druid girl was there, squatting beside a large fireplace. She was turning her wand over and over, giving it a sulky look as if it had wronged her. So it had really not been a dream. He had somehow been flung into another world, far away from the people he knew. Far from Elanee, and far from his god.

“Your pardon…?”

She stared at him with a scornful curl of the lip. He had been expecting that. The girl reminded him strongly of one of his sister’s friends during her rebellious years.

He mimed putting on a pendant. She rolled her eyes, then pointed her wand towards a corner of the room where his armour lay heaped on the floor. The bronze Eye of Tyr hung above the pile, sharing a hook with a bunch of dried leaves. It looked like the mint that grew in lavish quantities around streams in the Sword Mountains, flourishing even where nothing else could.

The sight of the pendant calmed him. Now that he knew where it was, he did not feel he needed to put it on immediately. Instead, he became aware of his next problem, which was that he was naked from the waist up. His shirt must have been removed to allow the wound in his side to be dressed.

A bandage held a poultice in place. He sniffed. There was the smell of vegetable matter, as well as something more astringent in the mix, but he could give nothing in it a name.

Even if he had excellent reasons for reclining on furs without a shirt, Brother Ingelnicht would not have approved. The strict seminarian would have condemned even more vociferously of lying around without sufficient clothes on in the presence of the opposite sex, no matter their age or character. Casavir almost smiled as he imagined how the old priest would have reacted if he had met Harcourt and Sand. With an apoplectic fit, perhaps…

Immediately afterwards he felt a pang of guilt. Ingelnicht had been set in his ways, but he had been a kind tutor on the whole, especially with his favourites, of whom Casavir had been one. It could not be right to laugh at his memory. Could it? There had been far worse men in Neverwinter occupying far higher stations.

Something poked him in the bicep. It was the tip of the girl’s black wand. That was all the warning he received before she dropped a hot plate of food on his chest. The roasting hot earthenware on his flesh caused him much more pain than her ice cantrip.

He winced. She smirked, and stalked back to the fire.

The food smelled undeniably enticing. He moved the plate hurriedly to rest on the pelt away from his skin. Bread fried in dripping. He could not remember when he had last eaten.

He forced himself to eat slowly, taking moderate bites and chewing ten times before swallowing. But he was ravenous. Had he been alone in the room, he would have devoured the greasy bread by the handful. The taste reminded him of the simple meals they had made in the mountains, those times when it had been safe enough to light a fire. It was not quite the same though: the fat was not sheep fat, the bread came from a different, denser grain.

After finishing every morsel, he looked round for somewhere to wash his hands, but saw nothing. Then he realised that he was extremely thirsty. He mimed taking a drink from a beaker. The girl pretended not to notice him. In any case, it was poor manners on his part to treat her as if she were paid to wait on him.

He stood up. His side twinged a little, but felt much improved on yesternight. Whatever was in the poultice was working. Despite the high ceiling, a couple of the beams that supported it were so oversized – like tree trunks – that he realised he would have to stoop to cross the room.

He looked round, and spied his shirt balled up at the far end of the animal skin bed. There was a proper bed in the room too, perhaps used by the girl or Flemeth or both. In Neverwinter some of the most impoverished families had to share one bed. If they could afford a bed. Or a house.

Sometimes he wondered why he had not done more to help the slum dwellers. He had certainly known about them. Seen them sloping through the alleys with pinched cheeks. But it had always seemed simpler to leave those matters to the Ilmateri. Tyr stood for justice through martial valour above all. It was outside the seminary and Church that he had learned more about other kinds of courage. Or started to.

His shirt, once unrolled, proved to be a mess of blood and sweat, and had quite literally been cut from his body. It would need soap, water, and an hour of work with a needle and thread to make it remotely wearable.

The girl snapped something in her guttural language, and a heavy cloth fell over his head. It proved to be a clean shirt made of a dense, light material akin to linen, and a woollen overtunic.

“Thank you.”

She threw a leather belt at him. She really was very like his sister’s terrifying friends.

He used his old shirt as a rag to wipe the grease from his hands before pulling the new clothes on, and loosely fastening the belt so that it held the tunic closed, but did not put pressure on his injured side.

The girl pointed to the door, and poked his back with her wand.

“That is not necessary,” he told her. He was sure she understood his essential meaning because the next time she jabbed him, she did it harder. He moved to the door, feeling like an ox being driven by a short-tempered wagoner.

Outside he was glad of the wool tunic. The contrast between the drowsy warmth within and the bite in the wind across the threshold was stark. All the more so in the dawn. Pale light was eating into a charcoal miasma. The light came from behind the house; if the heavens were not utterly alien to his own, then that meant the east must lie in that direction too. A mist clung to the ground to the west as far as the limits of his vision.

The thought that he was going to be driven away into the unknown landscape, away from fire and food and the abode of the woman Flemeth who knew his language, hovered uncomfortably at the front of his consciousness, in the way that, according to his experience, disagreeable ideas tended to do.

But he need not have worried. She pointed to a bucket containing water and a metal ladle, and then to a small hut a few yards away from the main building. The privy, he assumed. This world could not be _that_ different.

He knelt by the bucket, and brought a ladle of water to his lips. It looked fresh. It smelled fresh too. Feeling very aware that the girl was watching him as if he were an animal on display in a pleasure garden, he slaked his thirst, then emptied another ladle of water over his face and hair. If she had not been there, he would have stripped and washed himself all over.

It was a relief when he made towards the privy that she did not attempt to follow him. Instead, when he emerged into the open air a short time later, he found her dropping a pile of gear against one wall of the house. There was a roll of weighted net, two hand nets, a sack, and a broadsword on a leather baldric. Without thinking, he walked across and reached for the broadsword.

Both belt and sword were old, but seemed in good condition. The grip was worn, though pleasantly so. It let the hilt sit smoothly in his hand. He drew it, and tested the edge. Sharp enough. A whetstone could have made it still sharper. He resheathed it.

The girl had been watching him. Se gestured to encompasses the nets, sword, and sack, then pointed at him.

“Now?” he asked.

She made the same gesture again, and this time muttered a string of _uchs_ and _esses_. The aspirate sound at the end almost certainly meant “idiot!”

So he was to be her packhorse, not her draught oxen. As a knight, and thus, as his parents had enjoyed boasting about, one of the nobility, he should perhaps consider it beneath him. Instead the prospect of simple work felt like a gift. As the Keep’s garrison had expanded and submitted to Kana’s organisational energies, there had been less and less for him to do. Since no one had needed meals preparing, wood collecting or the horses grooming, in the end training and prayers had taken over almost everything.

First he shouldered the sword. It was frustrating to be unable to ask her what kind of danger the girl anticipated. What lurked in the wildlands? Frustrating too that he could not ask her where Flemeth was. Flemeth, who was her…mother? Grandmother? Guardian? She had been left to her own devices when he arrived, and again today. Whatever they were too each other, overprotectiveness did not seem to feature markedly in their relationship.

He scooped up the fishing gear, crouching rather than bending to keep his side straight. As soon as he had tucked the roll of net under his arm, the girl was off.

She started out by taking light, sure steps in the direction that he thought of as the west. The direction he had approached the house from yesterday. After a short distance, the form ahead of him changed, flowing smoothly into the shape of a grey wolf. At the edge of the clearing, where long tawny grasses sprouted, and bent trees bore leaves criss-crossed with yellow veins, the beast paused. Pricking up her ears, she gave one short huff of a bark. Her tail brushed the ground.

“I will follow,” she told her, knowing that she would not understand, but wanting to speak anyway. He moved towards her; once he came within a spear’s length of her muzzle, she turned and trotted away.

The walk was long. They passed through areas of bog, and over the barren, pebble-strewn crests of shallow undulations in an unpeopled landscape. Sometimes they crossed streams, or trod soft-footed through stands of pine. Birds fluttered here and there, haunting patches of tree or shrub, but he could not say if they were different to the ones on the Sword Coast. Most were small and brown and dull.

That could be deceiving. Elanee had told him that, before transforming into a mistle thrush that perched on his wrist. Let him stretch out each wing in turn for examination. What seemed like grey at a distance was revealed to be lines of cream and silver feathers tipped with coal. The breast was white, but marked all over with tiny brown scallops that a skilled clothier would have rejoiced to have designed.

The wolf often ran ahead, then pelted back and woofed at him to hurry. Once he lost sight of the shapeshifter altogether, and was just ready to believe that he had been abandoned in the wilderness when she reappeared from a thicket, swallowing the last of an unfortunate rodent.

The sun was high as they reached the shore of a pool. He had never seen the like, not even in the mountains. The base of the pool was a single piece of smooth rock, the colour of a midwinter sky. The surface was large enough to contain Castle Never twice over, but for as far as he could see, the water was never more than a couple of feet deep.

Fishing was not a skill he had ever cultivated – not even after Shandra Jerro had arranged for carp ponds to be dug on the Keep’s western fields. After watching his bafflement for some minutes, pink tongue lolling out in what looked like amusement, the druid girl had returned to her human form and stomped over to him, muttering and hissing under her breath.

She grabbed the weighted net from under his arm, and marched along the shore with it, stopping at the point where a wide, shallow brook fed the pool. Unrolled, it emerged that the net was about seven yards long by one deep. Each end was attached to a sharpened stake. With the aid of a pebble from the riverbed, she hammered one stake into the earth on the near bank The ground in that area was covered in a low-lying plant with small leaves like clover. Under the pressure of his feet, it released a sweet scent, not comparable to anything he had met in his past life.

The girl was not inclined to let him linger and appreciate the local fauna. She shoved the other stake into his hands, and pointed to the opposite bank. He had suspected she would. He pulled off his boots, and rolled up his leggings to the knee. The water was very cold, though he had been through much worse. In the winter, there were streams in the Sword Mountains that had chunks of ice floating down them. This river crossing only served to refresh his tired feet. The bed was smooth; utterly without weeds.

He stepped out onto the farther bank, feeling stronger than he had since the last battle. They stayed by the pool for some hours. In her bear form, the girl waited on all fours a few feet from the bank, her black nose almost touching the surface. Every now and then, she would lunge, and sometimes her jaws would snap shut on nothing save water drops, but occasionally they would close on a fish. She ate the smaller ones on the spot, and threw the larger specimens onto the shore with a twist of her neck.

His efforts with one of the hand nets were less successful. He saw the fish gliding like dark ghosts under the surface well enough; still, the light on the water played tricks on his vision. He would swish the net down, and next spy his target some yards to the right. After something bit his calf muscle hard, and he started in pain and shock, he retreated to the bank. He now knew what sound bears made when they laughed. The one in front of him was overcome, sitting on her haunches in the pool, breath wheezing in and out as if in the throws of an asthmatic fit.

After that, he confined himself to retrieving the fish thrown onto land, and storing them in the hand nets that he rested at a secure angle in the shallows. He had heard that this was the correct thing to do; perhaps Arleg the gamekeeper had told him that when he was a boy.

During a pause in the onslaught of flying fish, which the bear had been aiming at him deliberately, he wandered up and down the shore. It seemed wrong that he felt…well. At ease. He was in another world being looked after by strangers. Tyr was gone. The god had no presence here. He was far away from everything he had ever known and loved. He should be in the depths of misery, and yet was not.

There’s never a stream or roadside bare

Too mean for the low gods to abide there…

The harmless piece of doggerel was once he had heard from poor Grobnar; he had been attempting to ignore him at the time. Like many of the gnome’s verses and queer notions, the lines had stayed with him after the serious matters he had been considering had diminished into long-gone nothings.

He felt sadness when he thought about Grobar; intense concern when he thought about Elanee, and sick to the heart when he remembered Katriona. Dead over three months, Tyr preserve her soul. And if he could feel that much, then his own soul must be intact. The dislocation had moved his body, but he was still himself. He was still Casavir of Neverwinter.

The bear threw a fish at him. Sometimes it was a relief to be hit by a fish, even a vast one with spiny purple fins. He stowed it carefully in a hand net.

By the time the girl was ready to return to the house, the sack was crammed with eight fish caught by the bear, and another five from the weighted net. She had killed each one by sticking a heavy claw through its brain before letting him pack it away. A sign of the decent nature that might lie buried under the adolescent discourtesy.

As before, she turned into a wolf and ran ahead of him. The way was slower this time – thirteen large fish made for an awkward extra weight; every mile or so, he had to change the arm that was holding it. Aside from that, the sun began to set at his back soon after they departed the pool, and he had to concentrate on where he put his feet.

It was when, by his reckoning, they should have been a mile away from Flemeth’s abode that he saw a straggling copse some hundred yards to his right beyond an area of bog and small rocky tumuli. The trees were not pines. They looked like the kind that had surrounded him when he found himself in the Korcari Wilds.

It would just be a small diversion; one that was necessary to satisfy his curiosity. Of the wolf there was no sign again. He would not be surprised if he found the girl already sitting by the fire when he returned with her catch.

Even if there was a portal within those trees, he told himself as he picked his way around the reeds and patches of standing water, it would do him no good. Merely return him to the uncanny Marchers’ Way. Having already been trapped there once, he had no wish to be so again. Though Flemeth seemed to understand its workings…

There was no portal in the wood. No sign of the little track he had followed. He was not sure if he was in the right place at all. What he did find, surrounded by a wall of spindly bushes and trees, was a ruin. Slender columns and arches encircled a floor of smooth white tiles. Leaf tracery decorated a few of the standing remains, losing a battle for prominence against the green of real leaves. Creepers and ferns were advancing across every carved surface.

He had seen many fallen wonders; an abandoned clan seat of the dwarfs, a few discreet survivals from the age of the Kings, burned-out mansions of the Oligarchy, and the monuments of an imperial people who had loved the earth more than the heavens.

This place was different. Even desolate, its lines forced the eye upwards. He stood at the jagged limit of the floor tiles admiring. A few hours ago, he had seen a still pool that seemed to merge into the sky. In the embrace of the curving stone walls, he could believe he was a minnow being drawn up past sea-smoothed rock and fronds of kelp towards the gaze of the setting sun.

Then suddenly the girl was next to him, a human once again. She said something long and rolling and completely incomprehensible. But for once she did not sound scornful.

She walked directly across the middle of the floor to that part of the wall where the creepers grew thickest; so thick that he was not sure how much masonry remained underneath them. Pushing the creepers aside with her arm, she beckoned him.

He wished she had not shown him what lay there. A face jutted out of the wall. It had powerful snarling jaws, and staring eyes. In shape, it could have been a bear, or a wolf, or a dragon. Its sculptor had been more interesting in hewing the sharp teeth than in the detail of the snout and ears. Time, too, had worn away many features.

“A foul creation,” he commented in a heavy tone. The girl raised her eyebrows, and shrugged. She let the tendrils fall, so that the leaves covered it again. He wanted to believe that someone had placed the face there at a later date; an ignorant newcomer with no understanding of the purity the first architect had achieved.

Purity. He was a stranger dressed in a borrowed tunic carrying a sack of dead fish on his back. To think of such a word now…but that should not matter.

A man was free to strive to be better than himself, nobler-spirited, whether he was a beggar or a lord. Old Ingelnicht had been fond of lecturing on that point.

They retraced their steps across the paving. He wandered; she strode.

A few yards into the forest, she stood stock still. Listened. Human hearing was clearly insufficiently keen, for she shifted back into a wolf, her head cocked, ear twitching. He understood what the stiff tail and the rapid rise and fall of her ribcage under the thick grey fur meant.

He dropped the sack and fishing gear, drew the broadsword from his sheath, and threw the baldric to the side.

“Get behind me,” he told the wolf. As she turned, he pointed to show his meaning.

She ran straight towards him. At first, he thought she was intent on spitting herself on his broadsword, but the flap of black wings much too close to his face for comfort explained her plan. The wolf was gone; to judge by its cawing, the crow was some distance above and behind him. In a sense, she had followed his instruction. He smiled.

Three figures ambled out of the tree cover. They were humanoid. Two were the size of humans; one approximated a dwarf. But their faces were wrong. Distorted.

They reminded him of the spasming corpses he had seen in the lair of a Shadow Priest. Yet these creatures appeared to be alive. In the way that maggots were alive.

They paused at the edge of the ruin. Sniffed the air. Brandished their weapons. Yowled. Grunted.

It was his duty to make peace. Sometimes only the final peace would suffice.

How foolish of them to waist time on display. The little one had a crossbow; he could neutralise that easily. If only the girl had provided him with a warhammer instead of a sword. This would be butchery; with a hammer, he could have ended it all in three strong blows.

He charged, quickly closing the distance between them. The one with the crossbow was still spanning the string.

Far too late. He was at close quarters now. He liked the look of them even less.

The two tall ones both swung at him wildly at the same time. Two notched long sword blades looping through the air. He parried both.

With a quick step to the side and a twist of his wrist, one of the longsword’s was dislodged from its owner’s grasp. The creature – its face was like a skull with mummified skin stretched over it – seemed to have enough emotion to be taken aback.

He delivered a savage kick to its head as it bent to retrieve its sword, then parried another clumsy blow from its doppelganger.

He had not forgotten the archer of the group. It was hovering, trying to find a clear shot and failing. Soon it would realise it had to retreat to get the line of sight it needed. No chance.

He caught the arm of the remaining sword-creature with his left hand, and bent it up and back. The resistance was more than he expected. But it still ended as he thrust the whole length of his broadsword through its stomach, right to the hilt.

Black slime poured out of its mouth. It stank like rotten flesh. Disgusted, he propelled the twitching, stinking carcass backwards at a rush.

The crossbow went _thunk_. He observed the head of the bolt emerge from near the spitted monster’s breast. Remarkably, after two death blows, it still struggled weakly, reaching towards his throat, or towards the hilt sticking out of its torso.

To his side, he could hear the creature he had kicked start to pull itself up, giving a gurgling snarl. Quickly, he calculated the angle necessary.

With a wrench, he pulled his sword free. The thing’s guts spilled over the grass as it collapsed. A sweeping cut decapitated its pathetic crossbow-bearing adjutant, that had been sheltering stunned behind it.

The last survivor of the trio had learned some caution. It circled him, snarling, but staying out of the immediate reach of his broadsword.

He feinted. It jumped back.

He made another feint. It hopped to the side, and made a rattling sound that might have been laughter.

It had completely failed to notice the wall at its back. The third time he lunged, it had nowhere to dodge. Its retreat hit solid stone.

Panicking, it raised its longsword ready to parry a downward swing. He gritted his teeth, and changed direction at the last second to make a brutal cut that bit deep into its wrist. The blade of his broadsword lodged in bone.

He could pull it free, but there were quicker ways to end the business. Without hesitating, he seized the monster’s hand, which stubbornly retained the hilt of its longsword, and bent it round. He gave it no chance to defend itself.

It screeched more as he snapped its mangled wrist than it did as he drove its own sword through its chest. More black slime flooded from the wound, and the horrible mouth. The teeth within were small and needle-thin, like a pike’s.

He turned away in revulsion, lingering by the corpse only long enough to pull his broadsword free. If more of these beings were at large in the area, he did not want to be unarmed. Admittedly, to judge by the skill of the ones he had encountered, he could despatch more of them bare-handed.

The thrill of battle began to subside. He felt sick. His head swimming, he made his way back to the spot where he had abandoned the fishing gear and the day’s catch. He knew the nausea would vanish in a few minutes; it always had before.

A crow swept past his shoulder to perch on the nets. It spread its wrings, croaking raucously.

“I am sorry you had to watch that,” he said to the bird, though nothing he had seen of the girl made him think she was likely to be sensitive to such bloody spectacles. He suppose he spoke out of habit; to hear his voice utter the words of care and fine-feeling that became a paladin.

The girl took the place of the crow. She stood a moment with her arms folded, regarding him with an inscrutable look. Then she rested her fist on her left breast, and bowed.

“You’re welcome.”

That was his allowance of friendliness for the day. Immediately afterwards, she shooed him away from the fishing gear, herding him from the ruin as far as the bank of a woodland stream.

There she made him wash his hands first, thoroughly; after that, she signed to show he should take off his tunic. It was covered in spots of the black ichor of the beasts he had slain. He obeyed, thinking she meant him to wash it. Instead, she used a branch to drag it onto a shingle beach, and set fire to it with a simple cantrip. His shirt followed. It was darkened with blood too.

He understood what he had to do as his tunic and shirt crumbled into ash. He washed his torso and arms, immersed his head in the part of the stream where the water was deepest and fastest flowing, submerged the broadsword afterwards, holding it under and wiping the blade with a strip of moss until every speck of pollution was gone. Finally he scrubbed his hands again, letting the gravel of the streambed rub against his nails.

Even so, the girl would not let him shoulder the sack of fish until he had shown her his clean palms.

His regret at leaving the beautiful ruin behind was obscured entirely by his relief at leaving the corpses. The headless trunk of the crossbow wielder was still jerking like the carcass of a chicken with a wrung neck. He gave each ragged heap a wide berth.

For the remainder of the journey, the girl kept to her human form. Sometimes she walked beside him, shooting him side-long glances from her pale eyes. At other times, she dashed ahead, then waited for him to catch up with a bored pout. He did not want to consider why she had decided to offer him closer company on this last stretch. He was cold and self-conscious enough without the tunic as it was.

Their return to the bent old house did not mean immediate rest. The fire needed to be laid, the extra fish to be hung in the smokehouse and the ones for dinner gutted, and fresh water needed to be drawn from a small well that lay concealed at the back of the dwelling. The girl proved as adept as ever at showing him with signs and expressions what tasks she required him to do. He suspected that she could have fit in seamlessly with the matriarchal drow of the Underdark.

He tried miming to show that he would like a replacement shirt. She shrugged, and very firmly indicated that if he was cold, he should put another log on the fire. Or put himself on the fire. One of the two.

He was not cold. He put another log on the fire anyway.

The largest of the fish was sizzling in a tray of butter above the flames when Flemeth at last reappeared. She was in her peasant garb. Her hair looked windswept, though when he last went outside, the night had been still. Her yellow eyes raked over the scene: him squatting by the hearth, the girl peeling the bark from a branch with a pocketknife.

“Fetch the man something to wear. We are not quite Chasind yet.”

The girl jumped up, and began to speak quickly, pointing at him at intervals with a manner that seemed more excited than was her wont. When she put her hands together in order to swing an invisible sword through the air, he realised she must be describing the fight by the ruin.

“That’s as may be,” said Flemeth, “but he still needs a shirt. Off with you, girl.”

The druid girl threw up her hands, and stalked away. She was disappearing up a ladder as he turned the fish over to fry on its other side. Then he looked at Flemeth.

Her chin and cheekbones looked rather sharp as she returned his gaze. Her mouth was turned down at the corners.

“That girl is not destined for you, man of Neverwinter. Her fate lies elsewhere.”

He was surprised that she addressed the topic directly. Surprised too at her precise choice of words. Destined? What was the girl destined for? 

“She is far too young for me,” he hastened to assure her. “I would never touch a child.”

“I have heard many men make such promises before, and break them too.”

“I am not many man.”

Flemeth gave a dry chuckle. “No…you’re not, are you?”

They made eye contact again, briefly. He broke off to add another handful of dried herbs to the melted butter. They smelled appetising. Like pine needles mixed with thyme and sage.

“Who is she?”

“Morrigan is my daughter. The last of all my daughters, but not the least, as I am sure you know by now.”

He nodded. The girl – Morrigan – had spirit, even if he was not sure where it would lead her. He hoped for her sake that it would be down a lighter path than Qara’s. And a happier one than his own.

“The fish is ready,” Flemeth remarked, as Morrigan herself reappeared feet first, scuttling down the ladder with the ease of a Luskan sailor. She threw a clean shirt at him.

Feeling huge relief in receiving such a simple thing, he pulled it on. He had set a platter to warm by the hearth, and deposited the fish on that. It was so large that its head stuck out over the rim.

About to ladle some of the butter and herbs over the pink-tinged scales, he was forced to stop abruptly when Morrigan darted forwards, her pocket knife drawn. Before he could say anything, she had cut several thick chunks of flesh free from the bones, and fled. The door fell shut behind her.

Bemused, he emptied the ladle onto the much-diminished fish.

“She is lacking in manners,” said Flemeth. “I am at fault there. Living in the wilderness as we must, the tedium of tutoring her in the art of sitting at table, making small talk and using the correct cutlery at the approved time seemed an unnecessary burden on my time and patience.” She gestured to the fish. “Eat.”

“Will you not - ?”

She shook her head. He was starving again. Despite knowing that she would not care a fig if he tore the meat off with his teeth, his habits of restraint and neatness, ingrained long ago, obliged him to divide the fish flesh into small chunks before allowing himself to eat.

The first bite melted in his mouth. It was excellent. So different to the white bait stew the cook at the Keep had tormented them with at the end of every ten-day.

“Of course,” Flemeth continued, “we are not utterly bereft of company here. In less than six nights, for example, a party of templars from Lothering are going to reach this place. They will have blood on their minds.”

He was glad he had not rushed his meal. He might have choked on it. “Lady, do you mean to say that they seek your death?”

As he understood it, a templar was a warrior sworn to defend the shrine of his God. Not someone who went on missions to kill women and children.

The old woman was serene. “Of course they do.”

“But – why?”

“Custom. Ambition. Malice. I live with my daughter outside their rule and strictures. At liberty to use our magic as we see fit. This wilderness is our refuge and our domain. Such freedom is intolerable to them, brought up to revere the yoke and the whip from their earliest years.” Her gaze intensified. “The stories – myths - about me only serve as a spur to their bloodlust.”

That was clearly not a full explanation. Yet it was not completely incredible either. He could well remember walking through a deserted lodge on the eastern side of Neverwinter Wood. The corpses of its half-orc owners were laid outside on the grass, the consequence of a visit from a party of Greycloaks who had heard a rumour of misbehaviour, and taken both matters and the family’s valuables into their own hands. There was no penalty for them: after the war with Luskan, able-bodied soldiers were too precious a resource to be yielded up to justice. Of course, if a baying Neverwinter mob had called for their lynching, it might have been different.

He put the dish down, finding that his appetite had vanished. “If such propensities drive them, then I deplore it.”

She did not seem to be disturbed by his cautious phrasing. “When they come, they will hunt for me, and find me nowhere. They know nothing of my hiding places, and less of me. But Morrigan – should they catch her, they will not be gentle. She has said many times that she would rather die than be trapped like a bird in a cage. I do not know if they would even give her the choice.”

He was aware that he was being manipulated. He had no doubt at all that both Flemeth and her wild daughter could escape from almost any threat imaginable. But he wanted to know why. So, naturally, Flemeth changed the subject.

“I have passed my time today most pleasantly.” Her dark voice was all at once brightened with a note of sweetness. “Your world is far more interesting than I had given it credit for. So many living gods and spirits, and enchanters held in positions of high honour. Such civilisation!”

He stared. “You travelled to my world?”

“Why, certainly. I wished to know more about the stranger I chanced upon on the Marcher’s Way, and what better way than to visit his homeland?”

A flood of recollections surged through him. Elanee. The Keep. The city, evacuated and guarded by a skeleton company of soldiers and a few officers of the Watch. He had left it all behind. Not intentionally, but the result was the same. At least he was missing the redoubled political manoeuvring that would be proceeding now the crisis was over.

“Was it well? Did you see many people? Were the refugees returning to the city?”

Flemeth shrugged. “I saw no refugees. The one town I passed through was covered in garlands, and music was playing in the streets. The people there were celebrating the departure of the local chief and his warband for a battle somewhere.” She waved a hand in dismissal. Battles did not interest her.

“What was the chief called?”

“He had an odd name. Let’s see, the common folk were shouting it as the procession passed through the gate…Neverthorn. That was it.”

Recognising the name instantly, he nevertheless had to question his memory. His attention to his history lessons had not always been flawless. Still, the story of Neverthorn had been of the sort to catch the interest of a ten-year-old boy.

“Lord Neverthorn was the last of the Kings of Neverwinter. He was killed in Battle of Blackbridge along with most of his army. About three hundred years ago.”

His host had been wandering around Neverwinter, a _town_ in her estimation, over two hundred and sixty years before he was born. That could not possibly be right.

Flemeth clicked her tongue. “Such a shame. He was a handsome boy. Reminded me of a young prince I met once. Or was it a king-in-exile?” There was absolutely no confusion in her tone, or in the keenness of her eyes.

For the first time that day, he wondered if he had gone mad, or was trapped in a strange dream. Perhaps in reality he was stumbling blind in the dark around the lost corridors of the Illefarn palace.

“Princes come here?”

“Only if they are brave. And need my aid, for they certainly do not visit for the pleasure of my company.” Her lips twitched. “I make…bargains. Are you willing to make a bargain with me, Sir Casavir?”

The yellow of her eyes darkened to amber. Hawk eyes, snake eyes, dragon eyes. There were paladins who would have clutched their holy symbol and prayed at the mere sight of her. He had no wish to make a bargain with such a woman. Yet he also knew no ill of her, save that she had had the temerity to give him shelter and healing when he was lost.

“What do you suggest?”

“Kill the templars. Do that task for me, and I will ensure that you reach your own land safely. If I am feeling particularly generous, I will even send you back to your own time. You do still wish to return, don’t you?”

He paused. “I do wish it.” He thought his answer was true, but he was full of doubt. Back to Neverwinter and the power games, the corruption. Aarin had been a good man, and he had left. Casavir had stayed. Which of them had been right?

He winced. The injury in his side had stung him, though it had caused him no difficulties throughout the day.

“If I refuse, what will happen to me?”

Flemeth gave one of her disdainful smiles. “That I cannot answer. Probably you will be very cold – you may find it less than comfortable to shelter in a house after fanatics have burned it to the ground.”

“Fanatics? You mean the templars?”

“Of course I mean the templars. Overgrown children dosed on lyrium to keep them sufficiently insane, and given swords to play with instead of dolls.” The contempt in her voice was entirely real, he believed, and not assumed for his benefit. Such a note of bitter sincerity was new from her.

“I would not let these people hurt you or your daughter. Not while I live. No bargain or pact could bind me more than my own word. Nevertheless…”

“…hmm?”

“…I am a knight. Not a butcher or a soldier or a bodyguard. I want to talk to these templars. I want to know who they are, and what drives their actions, in their words, or as close to it as possible. You could be the interpreter.”

Flemeth laughed aloud. The laugh was pleasant – gentle. It was the only aspect of her that was untouched by a painful sharpness of mind and manner. “I fear the only way such a scheme could work would be if each templar was laid flat and bound with triple knots. Of course, if you could arrange that, I would be happy to translate for you. It would be a novel experience. My advanced years don’t allow me many of those.”

“If it must be. They will speak, and be made to listen.” He was not agreeing to any bargain, he told himself. In Neverwinter, merchants made deals by shaking hands – the left hand though, always. To shake with the right was considered bad luck. He did not know how Ammon Jerro made his pacts, and preferred not to.

“There may be a simpler method. I favour simple solutions, provided they do not abet stupidity.” She stood up. For an old woman, her movements looked fluid and effortless. She noticed him watching. “I have lived a long time. That is not the same as being decrepit, senile, or at the mouth of the grave.”

She rooted around on the shelves near the hearth. After removing the lids from a couple of earthenware jars and sniffing, then giving the contents a look of revulsion, she found what she sought. He braced himself for what was coming.

“Drink,” she said, handing the vessel to him. A dark fluid lapped against its sides. “It will permit you to communicate with the templars. If I had a choice, I would choose _not_ to understand them. Their ideas are inevitably primitive and violent. But you are stubborn, so I expect you will persist until you have discovered your error for yourself.”

It did not look appetising. He did not think she would try to poison him, but the possibility that the drink had mind-altering – or controlling – properties was more plausible. What was the name of the substance given to templars? Lyrium? This was one of thousands of situations that his training in the seminary had not prepared him for.

Impatiently, Flemeth recaptured the jar, and took a gulp herself. “Thirty years old, and as fresh as if it were set down yesterday. I am not trying to kill you, young man, I assure you, and the only enchantments I am working on you are my powers of persuasion.”

He paused again, then nodded. If he had been on the Sword Coast, he would never have touched the brew. He was not on the Sword Coast. He took back the jar, and drank. The taste matched the smell.

“What does it contain?” he asked. It was the question he should have asked before he let his lips touch the stuff.

“Only a few ingredients. Chalsind brandy, dragonthorn, felandris. The active element is blood.”

He considered sticking his finger down his throat to make himself throw up. She shook her head in amusement.

“My blood, naturally. Well, what did you expect? I am a witch, and an apostate, and live almost alone on the edge of a swamp.” He half-expected to hear Lila Farlong butting in to dispute the nature of the terrain beyond the house: fen, bog, or marsh. Definitely not a swamp. “Did you think I would make my potions from flower-dew and starlight? Really. Your world is not so different to mine.”

He was about to ask what the potion would do to him when Morrigan returned. Although she had left via the main door, she re-entered the room by sliding down the ladder. That puzzled him, until he remembered the crow.

“Has he not eaten his fish? What a waste.” The girl grabbed the plate from the floor, and set to work on the remains. “Perhaps there are not fish in his world. His idiocy at the lake was a thing to be seen. A Chalsind infant would have had more skill.”

He blinked, then felt a smile spread across his face. She sounded exactly as he had imagined she would.

“Why is he smiling? I have taken his food away. The fool should be angry.”

“He’s not a bear, girl,” said Flemeth. “He has agreed to deal with some templars for me. By talking to them.”

The girl scoffed. “Talking to them! I saw him turn Darkspawn into mud with a few strokes of a sword. Why waste time -” she broke off. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at him.

“Conversation, I was once told, should be the first weapon in a knight’s armoury.” It had been useless against the orcs. And in Neverwinter, speech served to conceal as much as to display people’s true nature.

“What do these knights do after they have had their throats torn out?” Morrigan demanded. She had adjusted at once to his sudden ability to make himself understood. If she felt any embarrassment over what she had said in his hearing, which he doubted, she did not show any sign of it.

“They go to their god in peace, with clean souls.” She did not like that answer. He would have been shocked if she had.

After eating some leftover bread and cheese, he retired to his makeshift bed of fur. Flemeth departed into the night without explanation. Morrigan, apparently used to her mother’s behaviour, sat cross-legged by the fire with a book open on her knee.

He was tired, but it was a good kind of tiredness. Tomorrow, he could worry about the templars, about Flemeth, about what he ought to do. For now he had warmth and food. If more of those creatures came to attack the house – Darkspawn, the girl had called them – then he would kill them. But he did not think they would dare attack a house owned by Flemeth. This place felt safe. Homely, even.

He closed his eyes. His thoughts drifted to Elanee, her many looks that shifted like the light and shade on a forest floor. One particular memory inveigled itself into his mind, as it did too often for his liking.

West Harbour. Spring. The last of the fire elementals crackling to an ember on the cold earth. Pieces of a golem lying mangled at his feet. His back to the wall of an abandoned house. Legs stretched out in front of him.

“You’re hurt.” A delicate face appeared out of the night, and drew closer to his own. Green eyes flecked with gold looked at him in concern.

“A scratch on the forehead. Nothing serious…”

“Let me look…” Fingers reached out and stopped a needle-point short of his skin. “It’s shallow, but still needs treatment. Was it the Reaver?”

“Yes, his scythe.”

“Foul things,” she said, as she poured clear liquid onto a cloth. “Hold still – let me clean it. It might sting, but it needs to be done.”

Auburn hair brushed against his shoulder as she change her position. He felt a new warmth over his thighs, and realised that she was kneeling over them. So that she could see his face more clearly. Of course.

Her expression was cool and collected. She dabbed the cloth over his skin with soft, steady movements. Not lingering like a seductress. Not brisk like a nurse.

It had seemed to go on for a long time. He had not noticed any pain. Had only seen her eyes and lips.

And in unfeeling reality, the most sensual experience of his life had ended when Captain Farlong had roughly ordered the focus of his world away to tend to someone else. But many times afterwards, when he relived the episode, he had allowed himself to be alone with Elanee, and events would run on a very different course.

He rolled onto his side. It was wrong to think such thoughts. Wrong because he was in the presence of an adolescent girl, and wrong because it revealed his own baseness. Away from the druid, it was not her purity or her kindness he remembered. It was what he wanted to do to her.

He pulled one of the pelts over his shoulders. If there was any chance of sleep within the next few hours, he was going to have to find something more dull to occupy his mind. Something that would take him away from her soft hands and slender figure. Her hair brushing his cheek.

Sighing, he rested his head in the crook of his elbow, and imagined himself walking along the chalk track of the Marcher’s Way, the violet sky unfolding above him.


End file.
